Delusion

by Laura L. Sullivan

  Then, her body at last coming to its senses and shutting down, she fell in a limp heap, a flash of flame on sunset-touched white.

  Chapter 25

  Don’t get too near her,” Felton said, but Arden paid him no heed. He pulled her into his arms and bent close, whispering inarticulate pleas, salting her face with tears.

  When at last she opened her eyes, the three magicians who remained cringed back, but Phil’s tragic face cracked in a radiant smile when she saw Arden safe and whole. The rest of the world, everything that touched the Essence, was still there, but it murmured unobtrusively in the background now, and for the moment at least, she could devote herself to Arden.

  “Is it over?” she asked.

  “God, is it ever!” muttered Hereweald. Slowly, what she had done came back to her, and she looked beyond Arden to see the cataclysm of her own making. There was a great scar in the land, utterly devoid of life. Not a plant, not a microbe, not a magician or commoner remained.

  “Did I do that?” she asked, fragile as a fledgling, knowing the answer.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Arden said, helping her to her feet. “I gave you your powers back—your family’s powers. At least, I thought I did.”

  “How could I do . . .” She made a helpless gesture toward the carnage. The tide of Essence ebbed further, leaving memory on her mind’s shores. “Eamon Dooley—I killed him.”

  “And all the Dresdeners,” Felton said encouragingly. One must look on the bright side.

  “Nearly all,” Hereweald corrected. “I saw that blond bitch crawling away, and Bergen was with her.”

  “The Stour fighters?” she asked.

  “Gone, all but us.”

  “The Home Guard?” she asked, shaking. “Uncle Walter?”

  “Everyone who was close to the fighting is dead,” Arden said gently. Only those near him had been spared.

  Dead, Phil thought bleakly. Put like that, it seemed simple, an on-off switch that happened to be set to off. What I did was murder. What I am is a monster.

  “What did you do to me, Arden?” she wailed. The everything loomed again, and she had to fight off the myriad voices and sensations, the endless eddies of the Essence that plagued her.

  “I gave you a piece of myself. It was supposed to renew your link to the Essence.”

  “It did, oh, it did!” she said hysterically, feeling a man have a heart attack in Manchester, a flea biting a cat in Jaipur, a copepod in the North Sea beating its antennae like oars. “Make it stop, Arden. Please. I can’t bear it!” She covered her ears, but that did nothing. She covered her face, beat her head against the snow, and felt the Essence rising in her again, blessing her with unwanted connectedness, threatening to take over her mind, drive her to madness. And if I go mad, I’ll lose control again, and—

  “Arden, take it away or kill me. I’ll hurt you. I’ll hurt everyone. I can’t stop it!”

  But somehow, with his loving hands in her hair, his warm breath on the back of her neck, she found she could. Moving very carefully, as if her whole body were a reservoir full to the brim that any sudden move might cause to overspill, she stood once more. I am Phil Albion, she thought. I am myself. I am not this thing that was put inside me.

  “Do what they did to Godric Albion, please. I do not want magic.”

  He tried, reaching out with his own Essence, but nothing worked. Her power clung to her, greedily.

  “It’s just like before. I’d swear the Essence isn’t touching you.” He gathered the last vestiges of his strength and lifted a single strand of her hair, trying to change its color. “Nothing. You’re still immune to the Essence when it is wielded at you.” Awestruck, he said, “Phil, your power is incredible. Try something else. Show me what other things you can do.”

  She made the slightest gesture with her fingers, at the ruined land, the blight she had caused. “That is what I can do,” she said, closing her fingers in a fist. “And I will never, never use magic again.”

  “You’ll learn to control it, Phil. I’ll help you. It will get easier. There’s just so much power in you—no wonder it exploded like that. Generations of potential, all waiting to ignite. I know you’re shocked. What happened—it’s horrible. But if you hadn’t stepped in, my friends and yours would have died just as surely, at the hands of the Dresdeners. You still killed the enemy, and that’s the important thing. We’d have been lost without you. England would have fallen if the Dresdeners had won. You saved England, Phil! Isn’t that what you’ve been fighting for all along? Just think what you can do now!”

  “You don’t understand, Arden. You told me the Essence is good, pure. You can’t have felt what I’m feeling now. It hurts! If I blink, if I flinch, it will take me over again—and I don’t know what I’ll do! I don’t want to kill. I don’t want this. Oh, Arden, you ruined me!” But she clung to her seducer, the man who had ushered her from innocence to experience, and loved him still.

  There came a small, bright note in the shape of Joey, who staggered out of the holly bushes covered in gore.

  “Did I do that?” Phil asked as she hugged him tight.

  “Naw, bullet grazed my forehead. I’m a right mess, ain’t I? Hardly hurts, though don’t let on to Tilda.” Tilda, a plump, nurturing sort, his chosen sweetheart after he’d given Phil up as a lost cause, could be counted on to make a very pleasant fuss.

  “Blimey!” he said, wiping the blood from his eyes and getting his first good look at the carnage. “Did I do that? Must have used too much gunpowder. Where are the others?”

  If there’s one small consolation to being given near-godlike powers and slaughtering a good many of your friends, it should be the undisputed privilege of telling your story first and receiving unlimited sympathy. But when Phil and the others dragged themselves back to Weasel Rue, she had only to take one look at her sister’s stricken face to think that her own troubles must be fairly trivial, after all. She sent the weary men into the house with Stan and caught her sister’s hand.

  Fee perched on the porch, holding two pieces of paper. One, the featherweight airmail parchment, was obviously from Thomas; Phil could see his large, loopy scrawl. The other was a half-sheet telegram.

  Fee took a long, shuddering breath. “They regret to inform me...missing in action.”

  Grief, Phil could have handled, somber depression or wild weeping. What she could not bear was to see Fee diminishing before her eyes until she became a shell, a shadow. Fee’s great blue-pearl eyes were empty, as if everything dear to her had fled—all hope, all love, every tomorrow.

  “No,” Phil said gently, taking her by the shoulders and leaning into her. She knew what it felt like to be losing yourself. “I won’t let you go.” She pressed her forehead to Fee’s deathly cold one and tried with all her will to use their old familiar embrace to revive her. Their hair entwined, their eyelashes brushing, Phil reached out to her, seeking that alchemical blending that had solaced them so often before. Stay with me, Fee, she begged. Don’t give in to grief. It will pass, it will join the great sorrow that is life.

  She felt something electric pass between them and pulled back sharply, gasping. In giving herself to Fee, to be her prop and her support, she’d very nearly passed on a thread of her life, which would have awakened the dormant Albion power in Fee, too.

  Fee, emerging slightly from the void of her woe, examined her sister. If there was anything that could drag her from her misery, it was the need to succor her beloved Phil. “What is it?” she asked, slipping easily into the role of comforter.

  Phil told her, doing her best to be brave, but Fee knew her too well.

  She regarded Phil solemnly. “I’ve never had a burden that you didn’t gladly bear with me,” she said. “What you feel, I feel. We will always be together, in everything.” She took Phil’s hands, her own surprisingly strong. “Share it with me, Phil. I don’t know if it will make your weight lighter, but at least we will bear it together.” She pulled Phil to her again, but her sist
er fought her.

  “No, you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s a curse. I feel like I’m going bonkers, like I’m about to fly in a thousand pieces. I killed our friends, Fee! I killed Uncle Walter, and Eamon, and—”

  “Shh...hush, dear. It’s not your fault.”

  “But it is! I—”

  She pulled Phil to her one last time and repeated, very firmly, in exactly the tone Mum used, “It’s not your fault.”

  Phil stayed in her embrace, but she kept the Essence, and herself tightly in check. “Fee, no,” she said weakly.

  Fee, playing as dirty as siblings always do, whispered, in a hurt tone, “Would you really deny me the power that might help me save Thomas, if perhaps he’s still alive?”

  Abandoning herself to the inevitable, Phil let go.

  When the magicians returned a few minutes later, they found Fee burnished with an inner luminescence, grinning at all the world like it was her best friend.

  “Oh, Phil, it’s lovely!” she said, staring at nothing with a look of absolute adoration. “I can feel things under the snow, waiting.” Her face lit up even more. “A worm, Phil, so cozy—can you feel him? And my, it just goes on and on, doesn’t it? How do you keep track? Ah, that’s what you meant about the crazy part, I see now. But it’s like a symphony, all playing together. What does it matter if there are twenty instruments or a billion? It’s all the same song.”

  The flaw’s in me then, Phil thought bitterly. Why do I feel the struggle and suffering of life, while she feels only the joy? Why did I slaughter, when she sits there like Buddha under the bo tree?

  She felt a seed of jealousy, but it had no time to sprout, for:

  “He’s alive! Oh God, Thomas is alive! I can feel him!” Fee’s face flushed with excitement, and she was neither desolate nor enlightened, but just herself again—though with all the power of the Essence. “I can find him, Phil. I can bring him home!”

  She handed Phil the other piece of paper. “Maybe I can figure out where he is. Too bad the Essence doesn’t have a homing beacon. Or does it, once you get closer? Read it, Phil, and tell me if you find a clue.”

  Dearest, beloved Fee,

  I can’t tell you where I am, pet, and if I did, they’d censor it and throw me in the chokey for treason. I volunteered for something special, thinking it would be so easy for me, with the Essence to help me. Only, I didn’t realize...You see, we all knew England held the greatest concentration of the Essence. It’s the heart of the world. But I never dreamed that there’s hardly any Essence at all over here. I left England, and I felt as if part of me had been ripped away. I can sense it here, just barely, and if I exert myself I can draw up a trickle (I healed a razor slice this morning—army razors are so dull, I might as well use my bayonet), but not enough to do any good. So I’m stuck here, a common soldier. A commoner soldier. But I’m still fighting for the same thing. I’m still going to help make this world the peaceful and beautiful place you deserve, darling Fee. It just might take a little longer! I really don’t mind . . .

  Seemingly from nowhere, the last assassin slipped to Fee’s side and whipped the saber blade to her throat. Fee, half elsewhere, glanced up at the last instant—and dropped him with a thought almost before anyone else realized he was there.

  “If he’s alive, and missing, that means he’s captured, right? He must be in Germany. Do they treat their prisoners well? They better.”

  “Fee!” Phil cried, staring aghast at the dead man at their feet, then at her sister, who utterly ignored him. “You feel sorry for worms, Fee. You shed a tear and apologize if you slap a mosquito. How...how . . .”

  Fee regarded her sister serenely. In the back of her mind, she could still feel Thomas, somewhere. Could he feel her? She sent pulses of love through the earth’s crust but couldn’t tell if they reached him. “Would you rather I let him kill me?” she asked. “I don’t like swatting mosquitoes, but I’d be a fool to let them bite me.” She looked down to the corpse at her feet. “I’m very, very sorry,” she told it, utterly sincere.

  Phil took her sister’s slim hand. The Essence had changed her. She was still Fee, but she was something else, too, something vast, with a frozen place that had never before existed in her gentle soul. Or had it? Was it in everyone, waiting to emerge as soon as the power was there? The ancients were right to keep it in a cage. Maybe they were right about keeping magicians imprisoned, too. Phil could feel the power in herself, throbbing just below the surface, begging for release. Maybe if I train for twenty years, I can be like they were at Stour, swirling the Essence in meaningless currents, doing nothing more wicked than making exotic flowers and gentle tigers. Or I can chain myself like Uncle Walter. Only, how do you chain power like this? How do you beat back the knowledge that you can do anything?

  She bent her head to hide her tears, and read the last lines of Thomas’s letter.

  I really don’t mind dying, Fee, you must believe it. Everything comes, and everything goes. Of course I’d rather have a hundred years with you, but the important thing is that I had a moment. Our lives are such small parts of everything, really. They seem so big, but the Essence has taught me that a moment, an aeon, an inch, the world, are all the same. A moment’s as good as a century, if it’s the right moment. If I don’t come back, hold on to that, Fee. Hold on to our moment.

  Phil looked up at Arden through tear-hazed eyes, gazing at him, loving him like a ceaseless ache, but however she tried to fill her thoughts with that dark, handsome face, however she tried to recall the feel of his fingertips, the smell of his hair, it was all blurred somehow, and the image of dead bodies in a ruined landscape rumbled behind it, a juggernaut threatening to wipe out everything that was good.

  He kissed her and turned to consult with the others before he noticed her tears.

  “Which moment is mine?” she whispered after him, but he could not hear her.

  “We should go,” Arden said, coming back to her, taking her free hand, the one Fee wasn’t holding, a bit possessively. “We need to track down our brothers and tell them the truth. They were heading to London, to disperse from there. It will be hard for them at first, but together, we’ll give them a better life. The Fräulein and Bergen—do you suppose they went back to Germany?”

  “With their tails between their legs!” Felton said triumphantly.

  “Then England belongs to the good magicians again.”

  Except for me, Phil thought.

  She wasn’t sure if she shared Arden’s beliefs anymore—but she believed in Arden, and that was enough. “You’re coming with us, right Fee?”

  “For now, until I can figure out how to rescue Thomas. You’ll help me?”

  “Always, in everything.”

  “To London, then,” Arden said, giving Phil’s hand the slightest tug, freeing her from Fee’s hold.

  About the Author

  LAURA L. SULLIVAN is a former newspaper editor, biologist, social worker, and deputy sheriff who writes because storytelling is the easiest way to do everything in the world. She lives on the Florida coast, but her heart is in England.