by Lucy Auburn
"Levi! You let the fucking cat through, I can't believe you." My heart soars at the familiar voice, and Eve strides through the doors, crouched with her hands out. "Here kitty kit—ah, fuck."
She spots the Black Serpent.
Loathsome spots her in return.
Their reactions are immediate. You've never seen so many blades drawn in such a short period of time. Somehow Eve is holding an axe in one hand and three knives between her fingers in the other. Lothario has a short sword in each grip and a scowl on his face.
Scampering off to the side, Penny joins me, stretching up towards my knee and staring at me plaintively. I stare back.
"Things are a little busy right now," I tell her, as Eve and Loathsome start to trade blows. Knives fly through the air, and the Black Serpent dodges them. His short sword swings elegantly, and Eve blocks it with the handle of the axe. Penny still wants up in my arms. "I don't think I have a hand to spare to carry you."
She makes a little chirruping meow and digs her claws into my thigh. Sighing, I scoop her up, holding her under my left arm while still gripping the sword in my right. Penny is adorable, but she's also right: this rescue attempt is courtesy of her efforts, of that I have no doubt. If the cat wants to be held, the cat gets to be held.
Eve isn't the only one who comes through the door. Moments after she starts fighting the Black Serpent, annoyingly loud footsteps ring out, and there's Levi strolling through casually with hands empty of weapons, because his Affinity is a weapon in its own right. He's followed by the broad, tall form of Wyatt, a battle-ready Mason wearing black leather with his braid hanging down his back, and lastly Grayson, who seems to have found a replacement cane for the one that was stolen during the face-off with the Black Serpent.
They came for me.
The Fuckfaces.
I guess their faces are slightly less fucked now that they've pulled off a whole rescue mission for me. Maybe I'll start thinking of them as the Kinda Fuckfaces. At least, if we survive this ordeal and I decide to continue associating with their asses—their firm, undeniably gorgeous asses. Such annoying men have no right to those nice butt cheeks.
Kicking out of my arms, Penny decides that she'd rather be on the ground. For a moment I wonder if she heard me think about the Fuckfaces' asses and disapproves, until I see her pounce on a little mouse scurrying beneath the fallen leaves. Trust a cat to find a hunt in the middle of chaos.
At least it looks like Eve is about to win—she's got Loathsome backing up step by step towards the castle, and has a grin on her face. I'm just glad not to be the one on the other side of that maniacal woman's combat skills for once. As long as he doesn't portal out of here, she has the Black Serpent dead to rights.
Which means the rest of us don't really have much to do.
"Ellen." Grayson's eyes flick to me, and for a moment he appraises me. I can't tell what the fucker is thinking, but I hope it's something like, man, I should apologize to that woman for being such a shithead. But no, he just says, "You have my sword. I want it back."
Rolling my eyes, I gesture towards him with it. "This sword? The one you brought into the arena during my initiation even though it's against the rules?"
"I told you, we're killers, Ellen. The rules don't apply."
"You seemed to think they applied pretty firmly when you insisted I was a cold-blooded killer. Are you still convinced of that, or have you finally seen reason?"
His mouth thins, and he tells me, "Technically, we weren't able to interrogate your stepbrother to find out whether or not his memories were faked."
I roll my eyes. Trust Grayson to hold firm on this. He's an annoying ass. "But," he continues, "his death seems to suggest something was up. A... cover up, perhaps. I think it's possible you were framed."
"Oh, it's possible, is it?" I stalk towards Grayson, about to consider how hard I can hit him with the flat side of the sword until he yelps, when Wyatt holds up a hand to stop me. "What is it?"
"Look."
He gestures towards the battle. Eve is no longer on the winning side—she's lost her axe and is pulling knife after knife to throw at the Black Serpent, but he dodges each of them. Alarmed, I rush towards the two of them, not caring about the danger. Levi and Mason soon follow, while Wyatt hangs back to help Grayson down the treacherous side of the hill, even though I can hear him already protesting arrogantly that he can do it himself. The ass.
"Who is that man?" Mason asks, watching the Black Serpent start to toy with Eve, using his short sword to draw blood from her arm. "Other than your kidnapper."
"The Black Serpent," I tell him, hoping I know how to use Grayson's sword. "Stay back. I don't think he'd actually hurt me."
Levi raises a brow at me and quips, "I never refuse a woman's request to charge off into battle. You go first if that's what you want."
I rush past him, ignoring his antics. Everything seems to be a game to Levi, but not to me. Eve is drawing more knives to throw at Lothario, and circling around him, trying to head towards her axe on the ground so she can scoop it up. Her eyes meet mine and flick to the sword in my hand, and I immediately get what she's thinking.
This sword is pretty useless with a novice like me holding it. But if I can get it to Eve, she can fight the Black Serpent off, and maybe I can distract him long enough for her to take off her head.
Skidding to a stop, the autumn leaves strewn through the woods slipping beneath my boots, I watch Lothario circle Eve and wait for a good moment. He steps aside, taunting her with his swords, his back to us. She slips a little, holding her left arm against her body, and puts her right hand down by her side, watching him but waiting for me.
Now or never. Time to throw the sword to her.
As I toss it into the air, hoping that I've got the aim right, Mason takes a step forward. His eyes are on the fight between Eve and Loathsome, and he doesn't see the sword coming for him. Startled, I shout his name, and he turns to me—just in time for the blade to head right for his face.
Time slows.
He reaches up, eyes wide. At first it looks like he's going to catch the handle of the sword. It would be an easy catch, after all. His fingers skim the raven-shaped head. But he fumbles it, and the thing flips, blade skimming down the front of his broad chest.
Grabbing the blade, he pivots towards Eve just as Lothario turns at the sound of our voices. Unlike me, he manages to pull off the throw to Eve—by setting the sword on the ground and kicking it towards her. She picks it up, and while her opponent is distracted by new people on the field, rushes him and manages to land a slice across his shoulder.
Time speeds up again, and I'm the reason why Mason is clutching his left forearm, eyes wide, blood spilling out of his skin. The cut wasn't bad, but it seems to be bleeding a lot.
I wince, regretting throwing the thing in the first place. Grayson and Wyatt have caught up with us, and the former is looking at me with a scowl.
Levi shouts, "Shit!"
"See what you did?" Grayson shakes his head. To Levi his says, "Help Eve take that fucker out. Wyatt, support Mason's weight. We need to get him out of here."
With a sharp nod, Wyatt half-crouches and pulls Mason's injured arm around his shoulder. I stare at them as Mason turns pale. His hand slips off the wound, and though the cut is shallow—maybe a few inches, barely deep enough to bite into his skin—it's bleeding so much that his sleeve is soaked in it. Blood drips to the ground in front of my horrified eyes, and Mason slumps into Wyatt's arms, weakened.
"Mason!" I rush to him, hating myself for being responsible for this. "Why didn't you just catch the thing? Damnit—you're bleeding so much."
I pull my hoodie off to try to staunch the wound, but Grayson snaps, "Leave him. Wyatt will take care of it. You need to stay here, help fight."
"Eve has him—" But when I glance towards the battle, Eve is no longer on the upswing. Somehow the Black Serpent has flipped the battle around again. He's got Eve backing up on the defensive and is pushing the blade
in her right hand back with one of his swords. "We have to help. Wyatt—make sure nothing bad happens to Mason. And tell him I'm sorry I'm such a fuckup."
Though he looks peaked, Mason quips, "See ya later, fuckup."
Then Wyatt half-carries half-drags him back towards the doors. Turning away from them for a moment, I watch with my heart in my throat as Eve barely manages to hang on. But Levi is there suddenly, hand up and palm out, stalking slowly towards the fight.
I rush towards them, Grayson behind me, moving slowly with his new cane. Remembering how terrible it felt to have Levi's poison in my blood, I watch Loathsome closely, waiting for the moment when his life begins to drain from him.
But he doesn't falter or grow weak. Eve throws up defense after defense, her borrowed blade and fast footwork keeping him from taking her down completely, but he doesn't slow down or grow weak. It's almost as if...
"My powers aren't working." Levi frowns at his own hand as if it's to blame. I stop next to him, watching the two elite assassins fight a mere twenty feet away, at the foot of the castle. "There's nothing I can do to help."
My heart is pounding so hard that I can feel it in my throat. Eve—wonderful, loyal, whip-smart Eve, who let me back into her life like it was nothing and gave me all her support—is starting to breathe heavy, falter a little, her injured arm held against her chest. It's not bleeding nearly as much as Mason's mysterious injury, but she doesn't look good. Any minute now she'll falter completely.
I don't know what to do, but I do know that I won't just stand here and watch. I have to help. My eyes fly to one of Eve's discarded knives on the ground, and I rush forward to grab it from the leaf litter. It weighs more than I expected. Stepping back, I watch the two fight, waiting for a moment when I can throw the thing and maybe do some damage. If I use a little of my Physical Affinity to push it forward, maybe I can guide the blade so it hits the mark.
"You need to hold his hand." Grayson's voice, imperious and scornful, parts through my half-hearted battle plans. I frown back at him, and he gestures impatiently towards Levi, who's raising a silvery blond brow in his friend's direction. "He's your Conduit. That ability goes both ways, or it should. Hold his fucking hand, think happy thoughts, and save your damned friend. Or do you want to watch Eve be gutted?"
I hate his fucking guts right now, but he's right. I already fucked up and hurt Mason—time to woman up and get this battle over with.
Switching the knife to my other hand, I reach out and grab Levi's palm, twining my fingers through his. A crackle of energy goes through me at the touch, and I feel my Physical Affinity powers surge up in my chest, reacting to Levi's Spiritual Affinity. It's like we're yin and yang, instead of a stranger and a woman who farted in front of the stranger.
"Wow." He cracks his neck, the sound making me shudder. "I didn't notice it before, but Grayson's right. It works both ways. Here we go..."
Throwing his palm out, he aims his powers at the Black Serpent and narrows his eyes. I can't see anything happen in the air between them, but my connection to Levi makes it possible for me to feel what's going on. He grabs hold of the spiritual energy that fuels Loathsome and, like a cat tugging at a string, unspools it bit by bit, infecting him with poison instead of vitality.
The battle begins to change. Lothario falters, and Eve regains her confidence. Squeezing my hand, Levi tells me, "About now would be a good time for you to use your powers."
Oh, right. I'd almost forgotten them, since they've abandoned me in my time here. But with Levi holding my hand, there they are, waiting beneath the surface. My Physical Affinity surges within my hand as I hold it up, a mirror to Levi's palm-out use of his Spiritual Affinity, and I throw a force field directly at the Black Serpent.
He stumbles and falls to the ground, dropping his weapons, a grey sick pallor to his skin. I know what that feels like—when Levi used his Affinity on me I thought I was going to die. The poison is heavy in his spirit and his blood, turning the veins on his neck a sick green color that darkens by the second.
Eve steps back and disengages from the battle, throwing us a wide grin. Then she joins us at our spot on the hill. "Nice work."
Levi says, "Let's go."
"Wait. There's something I need to get back."
Dropping his hand for a moment, I lunge forward and grab my great-great-grandfather's knife out of the sheath at the Black Serpent's back. As I get close to him, his dark eyes look up at me, and I wince at the bloodshot expression in them.
"Don't go," he says. My stomach roils. "Ellen—you have to save me from this curse."
His fingers skim against my sleeve, and I frown as I dislodge them. "That's just a fairy tale."
I leave him behind without looking back, grabbing Eve's elbow on the way and helping support her weight. She looks tired, but in a good way—her injured arm doesn't seem to be affecting her.
"Good to see you," I tell her. "For a while there I thought I was completely fucked. Thanks for coming to get me."
"Don't thank me. Thank your cat. When she came running through an inter-dimensional portal in Headmaster Shu's office, we all figured out pretty quickly that something was up. Once we traced the portal back to here, the headmaster gave me special dispensation to use my ring to—"
"Help!" Wyatt's bellowed shout, clear as a bell, slices through the air and makes my heart jump. "It's Ma-Mason."
The doors back to Cain University are still standing right there, at the edge of the woods, but somehow Wyatt and Mason never made it to the other side. Wyatt is kicking the doors, pulling their handles, trying desperately to get them to open—but they don't budge.
They're not even glowing anymore.
It's as if they've lost their magic.
That's not the worst thing, though. Mason is in bad shape. His limp body is prone on the ground in front of the doors, pale and seemingly unconscious.
The pool of blood that surrounds him is nearly as big as the one around Jack's body the day he died, or in my mom's bed after she was stabbed to death.
A terrible foreboding fills me at the sight of it, and together with Levi and Eve—Grayson close at our heels with his cane—I rush to Mason's side, certain he's about to die.
Chapter 6
"It doesn't make sense. The cut was shallow. This much blood, it's almost like..."
"He has a weakness?" Grayson snarls, pushing my hands aside as I try vainly to staunch the bleeding. "All this because you wanted to show off by throwing a sword in the air."
Guilt stabs through my stomach, along with the panic. If something terrible happens to Mason because of my mistake, I'll never forgive myself.
Levi says, "It's not completely Ellen's fault. She didn't know about his weakness."
"I'm the one who wanted her to throw the sword. But we should argue later," Eve insists, as Wyatt bangs on the doors futilely. "We've got to find a way out of here and to a medic before that asshole regains his strength or Mason bleeds out. Anyone have any ideas why the doors aren't working?"
Grayson frowns, brows furrowed in thought. "It probably has something to do with this place, and the reason why our powers are greatly weakened here. Ellen, did you learn anything about the asshole while you were here?"
"The asshole is the Black Serpent." No surprise on Grayson's face at my proclamation; he no doubt wants to pretend like he figured it out on his own. "His name is Lothario, and he's fucking nuts. I haven't learned much concrete about him..." An idea occurs to me. "Except that he has an enchanted teleportation ring. He kept it on him at all times."
"Go fucking get it, then."
Leaping to my feet, I run back towards the castle. But even though he was just on the ground moaning in pain, the Black Serpent isn't where he was before. Somehow he managed to recover enough to drag himself around the corner. I find his heavy tracks in the ground—I'm no hunter, but even I can see the marks he's left behind, practically dragging himself away.
Following the path around the wide expanse of the castle, I
find him near the servants' entrance that I almost escaped through, the smell of salt water on the air. It's not the ocean like I thought, though, but a salt water pool fed by a fountain in the center. This near the edge of the Serpent's pocket dimension, the pool is doubled in the distance, strange and eerie.
He's crouched down near the edge of the pool, fingers trailing in the salt water. Black pools of poison follow his touch wherever it goes, and color is returning to his face by the second. Somehow he's using the water of the pool to rid himself of poison—and if I don't stop him soon, he'll manage to recover enough to fight us again.
Throwing my hand out, I gather the last wisps of power I have left from contact with Levi and send a pulse of telekinesis directly at the Black Serpent. It flies out of my hand and knocks up upside the head, throwing him several feet away from the pool. He groans, head lolling on the ground, the grey poison in his veins surging up towards his face.
"Your ring." Advancing on him, I do my best to sound intimidating. "We want it."
A chuckle escapes his dry lips, and he peels his eyes open, staring at me. I shudder at the black veins stretching up from his jawline to his eyes; Levi did a real number on him.
"What's the matter," he spits out, "not able to go through your special doors?"
"Do you know something about that?"
The grin that splits his face wide is gruesome, especially with his veins bulging dark with poison. "There's a protection around this cursed place. It lets others in, but not out. Only my ring acts as a doorway out of here... any other path is tangled and twisted."
"Then I want your ring even more now."
"Why, so you can leave me here to rot?"
"Just give it to me." I brandish my knife at him, heart beating fast. "If you don't, I'll get Levi over here to finish you off. Did you know he eats a person's lifespan? You look pretty young for someone who went to grad school with my father, but I bet he could change that. Good luck getting your next unwilling bride to cooperate when your face has crumpled like a one dollar bill in a stripper's thong."
