by D. N. Hoxa
Another ice shard flew right by my side from Julian, who was standing behind me, but Jane raised her arm in time, and the shard buried in it, causing no real damage. Before I realized it, her other hand was raised toward Julian and her spell broke his shield to pieces. Sparks filled up the hallway. When they faded, I saw Julian on the floor, motionless.
“I’m going to enjoy killing you, bitch,” Jane hissed. She was much closer to me than I thought, so when I turned around, she slapped me hard across the face. It wasn’t your usual slap, either. It was one that made me spin twice on air before falling on the floor again, thankfully on my feet. Conjuring my shield, I fell down on my knees and threw a knife at her legs, knowing that her spell would break mine to pieces already. The blade landed on her left thigh. Now, I only had one left. Turning to my spell stones didn’t seem like a good idea since she’d stopped the first I’d thrown under her shirt without too much effort. But my beads were still good. They went after her neck, as fast as I could make them move while I wondered how the hell she was still standing and even throwing spells at me. She was supposed to be dead by now, or at least unconscious.
One spell hit me on the shoulder, turning my whole arm to ice. I lost control of my muscles and dropped the sword. With no time to grab it, I moved to the side again, and chanted another holding spell. It had worked before, and now that I had Jane’s ring in my pocket, and Ezra and Lynn were alive in my mother’s room, I was going to focus my every cell on the witch only.
My magic must have been much weaker than in the beginning, because my holding spell held her for only three seconds. All I was able to do was grab Julian’s sword, then conjure my shield again before she broke it to pieces.
The next spell was at the tip of my tongue, this one an electric wave, and it hit her in the chest. She fell back a step, allowing me to conjure a fire spell—of real fire, not like the one she’d hit me with—invisible and all-consuming. Jane’s right arm caught it, and orange flames danced on her skin. As it seemed, she'd run out of fucks to give, so instead of trying to put it out, she raised her arms towards me and her spell threw me across the hallway.
I hit something hard and took it with me before hitting the floor. It took me a second to realize I was in my room, above the door I'd broken down with my back. Rushing to my knees, I conjured my shield, knowing that Jane was coming for me—and I was right. As soon as she broke it, I spelled her again, but she kept coming as if she really was unaffected by the torturous spell I threw her way. I moved back, deeper into the room, the sword in one hand and my only knife in the other. My beads hit her everywhere, all at once, but for whatever reason, she still wasn’t feeling the pain. Maybe because this technically wasn’t her body? Who knew, but I definitely felt the charge of energy that hit me in the chest because I was too slow to raise my shield. Jane must have gotten tired, too, because her spell held me no longer than a second, and when I was free again, I threw my knife right at her face.
She dodged easily. That’s when I decided: no more spells. A blast of my fairy magic hadn’t killed her, but it had knocked her out cold. That was exactly what I needed—just a second to cut her head off. I closed my eyes and called on my magic, which was all over the place now: the fire, bright orange and fairy, and the coat of Bone magic atop, adding a glow to the flames. My left leg shook and almost gave when Jane’s magic wrapped around it, but I didn’t allow myself to feel. All I could think of was my magic, as strong as I could make it, as fast as was possible, hitting her everywhere, all at once.
That’s until something cold slid inside me, right between my rib cage. My breath caught in my throat and my eyes popped open. Jane was right in front of me, my own knife full of her blood, now inside my body. If I allowed myself to drag in air, the pain was going to make me collapse. I wasn’t strong enough to even raise Julian’s sword, which was heavy as fuck.
Jane smiled. Holding my breath, I put my free hand on her shoulder. It was the only thing I had left to do. Not knowing if it was even going to work, I released the magic I’d gathered, hoping it would be enough to save me.
The orange light, a mix of flames and smoke and liquid, rushed through my veins, to my hand and at the tips of my fingers. I allowed myself a breath of air when the energy left my skin and spread on Jane’s body.
She was no longer smiling.
My whole body was paralyzed, the center of the pain around the knife buried in my gut. But even that didn’t matter when Jane’s eyes turned in their sockets, and she fell down to her knees right in front of me, shaking. I’d never done that before, never unleashed my magic while touching someone, but it seemed to do the trick very well. Letting go of Jane was hard, but I had to get the knife out of me if I was to have any chance at ending her. Sweat covered me from head to toe and every breath I drew in took me closer to unconsciousness. My fingers wrapped around the handle of my knife and I fell against the wall behind me, no longer able to hold myself.
My knives were custom made, the tip of their blades curved so that taking it out of one’s body would be really, really painful. But I had the enemy’s body in mind when I designed them, not mine. For the first time, I realized just how much pain that blade caused when I pulled it out of my gut.
Bile rose up my throat when the knife fell from my bloody hand. Black dots filled my vision. Hot blood dripped down my stomach, making it impossible to ignore the pain. Jane was still in front of me, just waiting to die, and Julian’s sword was in my hand.
I could do this. I could finish this once and for all.
But I couldn’t.
Not without a healing spell, because if I so much as moved a single muscle I was going to hit the floor, and I wasn’t going to wake up. I couldn’t do that. Ezra and Lynn were waiting for me. Not matter how difficult chanting seemed right now, I was going to have to suck it up and do it, because Julian was still out cold and he couldn’t come to heal me this time.
Closing my eyes was asking for trouble, giving Jane an opening to kill me first, but it was the only way I could focus for long enough to remember a spell. And when I did, I chanted faster than ever before. It took me three times to get it right and put what was left of my magic in it.
When the spell began to do its job and knit my flesh back together, intensifying my pain while at it, I looked down at Jane again. Her eyes were back in place now, and she blinked and blinked before the view of me standing over her cleared enough. No time to wait for my healing spell to set in completely. It was time to kill a Hedge witch.
As if my own arm wasn’t heavy enough, it took a lot of effort to move Julian’s sword to Jane’s shoulder, very close to her neck. I smiled, despite the pain. I was getting stronger by the second, even able to stand on my own now, without needing the wall for support.
“I’ll make sure you stay dead this time, Jane. Can’t really say it was nice to meet you,” I said, and dragging in a deep breath, I swung my arm back.
Bye, bye, witchy.
“Stop!”
The word echoed in my head and shocked me enough to freeze my arm when the blade of the sword was barely an inch away from her neck.
I blinked a few times, unable to decide if Jane had really called out, or if my mind had shouted at me.
“I can help you,” the Hedge witch said in a shaky whisper. Yep, it had definitely been her.
“I don’t need your help,” I spit and swung my arm again. She’d ruined my momentum.
“I can help you find him, Winter. I know you want to.” My muscles stopped moving again.
Find him? Did she mean…
Her words spun around in my head, but I pushed them away. It didn’t matter what she meant. I was ending her now before I did something I’d regret for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately for me, my arm was still stuck above my head, my fingers wrapped tightly around the sword, and something wouldn’t let me bring it down on Jane’s neck.
Something that sounded an awful lot like my aunt Amelia:
My pare
nts imprisoned him. They used dark magic to do it…
He’s stuck in magic! I don’t know how. I’m not an expert in dark magic. That’s exactly what she’d said.
No, my aunt was definitely not an expert in dark magic.
But Jane Dunham was.
“Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock…” she whispered as I looked at her but couldn’t really see her, my arm shaking from the weight of the sword. She was too weak to fight me, and I was the one still standing.
Which meant I had a choice.
The tears caught me unprepared. They sprung out of my eyes as my own mind turned against me. I wanted to find my father. I wanted to meet the man who’d conceived me, the man who’d wanted me, but had gotten a magical prison instead. I already knew that I was going to look for him, but I also knew the chances of finding him were very slim.
Unless I had Jane. Unless she used her magic to show me, to tell me how to get to him. How to free him.
Something moved in the hallway. My heart stopped beating altogether. Jane’s smile said it all. She knew I was going to do it even before I did. It was why she’d bothered to look for my father in the first place, and why she’d told me about it.
Because she wanted to be prepared in case she needed a way out, like she did right now.
Believe it or not, I fought against myself every step of the way, but my body refused to obey to me. Instead, I lowered the sword, and I reached into my pocket, where Jane’s ring with the ravenstone was. The portal opener. With it, she could disappear. With it, she would remain alive.
I’m not going to try to justify what I did because there is nothing I can say that will change the reality: what I did was wrong. It was cruel. Pure evil.
I knew all of it, yet I still opened my hand, and let her take the ring from my palm.
Footsteps on the hallway.
Jane Dunham disappeared.
Twenty two
Julian stood by the door. I looked at his face full of bruises and blood, and I burned to tell him everything. But the same thing that had made me help Jane escape, stopped me from making a single sound.
“Where is she?” Julian asked, looking around the room, his hands raised, ready to attack.
The realization fell hard on the pit of my stomach. I felt like a monster when I shook my head. “Gone.”
He stepped inside the room and slowly moved closer to me. “Gone? How is she gone? You took her ring,” Julian asked, shaking his head in shock.
Yes, I took the ring, and I gave it right back. I’d done bad shit before, shit that would make a grown man cry and run away screaming, but nothing came even close to this. I’d sold my soul. I’d officially stepped into the dark side, and I had a feeling that I was never going to find my way back to the light.
“She knocked me to the floor a few times. The ring must have slipped from my pocket.” I sounded like a stranger, and felt like one, too, when I shrugged. “I don’t know exactly how.”
I couldn’t look at him while I spoke the lies that burned holes in every part of my body. So much worse than any spell or any knife in my gut. I was disgusted with myself, and no amount of showers was going to change that.
When Julian put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me to his chest, my legs gave. He held me tightly against him as I cried in silence. Is this what being a monster feels like?
“You’re okay,” he whispered against my hair. “We’ll get her next time.”
If he’d stabbed me with all my knives at once, it would have hurt much less.
“Let’s go check if the kids and Bender are okay,” he said and when he let go of me, we were both surprised that I could stand. Wiping the tears with the back of my hands, I held onto his arm and walked back to my mother’s old room. Ezra and Lynn would be there, waiting. They were okay, and that was the only thing that made me feel like my life had any worth left.
Bender was awake, his face and body a bloody mess. He had two guns in his hands—one of them mine and empty—and he almost pulled the triggers when we opened the door. Good thing he controlled his fingers, and when he saw us, he fell back on the bed frame with a sigh.
Ezra and Lynn sat behind him, hugging each other, now with huge smiles on their faces. Ezra dragged himself over to the edge of the frame and jumped on the floor, before he ran and wrapped his arms around my hips.
That was the first time I regretted falling into Jane’s trap with all of my being. My body frozen, it took all of my willpower to put my hands around Ezra and hug him back. I’d failed him. I’d failed all of them so miserably. But worst of all, I’d failed my mother. It was amazing how little it took for a person’s soul to get tainted. Mine had in a matter of fifteen seconds.
“Is she dead?” Bender asked, making my whole body shake.
“She escaped,” Julian said. “But it doesn’t matter. We need to get going, in case she comes back.”
“What about the fairies?” Bender asked and rushed to the windows to look outside. Ezra let go of me and took my hand in his instead. It killed me every time I looked down at him. I didn’t deserve the trust he’d put in me. Not anymore.
“Looks like they’re gone,” Bender said after a second. “Come on, let’s go.”
The fairies were really gone. According to Marva and the witches, they’d simply sheathed their swords, then took off running down the street. Nobody had followed because their job had been to make sure Jane didn’t escape from the house—not the fairies. They hadn’t counted on me being the one to give her a way out.
Ezra didn’t let go of my hand, and when we made it back to the cars, he insisted I sat in the backseat with him. Julian joined us, and Bender and Lynn stayed in the front.
“We’re all okay,” Bender said as he turned the ignition on. “Thank God. I’m going to treat you guys with the dinner of your lives.” Lynn grinned, holding onto her backpack tightly. She’d gathered everything Jane had thrown to the floor, put it back into the silver chest, and taken it with her.
“You don’t look so good,” Julian whispered when we drove away.
“I’m perfect.” Even a stranger could have told you that was a lie.
“Stop worrying. Be glad it’s over. We got Ezra and Lynn. We’ll get Jane next time.”
Of course, he thought I was sad because Jane escaped. Why wouldn’t he? He didn’t know that I gave her back the ring and let her go.
“I know,” I whispered, unable to keep my eyes open any longer, because I couldn’t look any of them in the face. The shame was overwhelming. I closed my eyes and rested my head on Julian’s shoulder, holding on tightly to Ezra’s hand. Hopefully, by the time I went back home, the guilt would have eased, or I was never going to sleep again.
***
Bender took us back to Bloomsburg, insisting that we needed to all be there until Ezra was in safe hands. He was right. All the coven leaders were waiting for us in the big office, with a few bottles of champagne on the table. It looked like they were ready to celebrate.
When they saw us, me in particular, they weren’t prepared for the sight, so none of them managed to hide their flinches and cringes. I must have looked worse than I thought.
Oh, right. My ribs had been broken at one point, and lots of blood had come out of my mouth, blood I hadn’t bothered to wipe off my chin and neck, or Bender’s shirt. I didn’t think that dry cleaning was going to get rid of it, either, so I was just going to have to buy him a new one.
Amelia was there, too. With both her hands on her mouth, she looked at me for a long minute, shaking her head. Was it really that obvious that I was barely standing on my feet?
Handshakes and good jobs followed. A few of them tried to get Ezra away from me but he held onto my hand and hid behind my legs instead. Walking all the way to the white leather furniture was a nightmare after all the stairs—why hadn’t they put a freaking elevator in that building?—but I somehow managed with Julian’s help. Good thing Amelia kept away from me.
What happened? someone asked,
and suddenly, silence fell in the office. I was tired, hurting everywhere, unable to even call a healing spell to my aid, but the guilt…oh, the guilt was so much worse.
“We went in there. We fought. She escaped.” Escaped. God, I felt so filthy.
Another second of silence. It felt like everybody in that room knew exactly what I had done. They knew I’d let Jane escape on purpose, even though technically, I knew that wasn’t possible. They hadn’t been there. They hadn’t seen anything.
“It doesn’t matter,” Monica Raymond finally said, her old voice scratchy. “Ezra is alive. You are all alive. Nobody was killed. There is no greater success.” And she raised her glass full of champagne at us. I would have enjoyed one myself if Jane had really escaped, instead of me letting her. As it was, I lowered my head and waited for whatever they were going to say next.
“The Hedge witch thought the boy could make spells for her. He’s only ten,” Bender said, shaking his head in question. He was right to ask. A witch doesn’t get their powers until the age of eighteen. Until then, we were able to do little magic here and there, but that’s it. But Jane had been very sure that Ezra could make that spell for her to bring back her siblings, and Ezra had chanted like he’d lost his mind that morning in Bender’s house in Providence…
The leaders stood silent for a long moment. “He’s a Spellmaker, not just a witch,” said Alice River—her way of telling us that Jane had been right. Ezra could make spells, even at ten years old. Fucking hell, I still couldn’t wrap my head around that.
“Are you okay?” Ezra whispered to my ear. “You look like you’re in pain.”
