Three Kinds of Damned

by May Dawson

  I take a seat cross-legged on the floor in front of the mirror as Airren sits back. Small licks of orange flame rise up the twigs in the bowl. The restless feeling is stronger than ever for me now.

  Mycroft leans over me to adjust the mirror, his face cloudy. Cax glances up at him, clearly annoyed by his perfectionism, but he lets it pass.

  The air fills with a sweet scent of flowers mixed with the faintest thread of woodsmoke.

  “Give us some space, will you?” Myroft asks as he sits down across from me, alongside his own mirror. “I need to concentrate.”

  Cax starts to object, but Airren grabs his shoulder and pushes him ahead of him to the door, nodding to Croft. “Good luck, Tera.” Airren calls over his shoulder, and then he and Cax are both gone, the door slamming shut behind them.

  Mycroft glances at me over the mirror. “Pay attention. When I want you to do something, I’ll tell you.”

  “Like that’s something new,” I mutter. My world is full of bossy, overprotective men these days.

  He incants as he casts with his wand. I don’t understand the old language he speaks. It’s not Latin—we all learn that in school—but a softer language with rolling r’s. His face is intent, watching the flames, so I don’t ask.

  The lights go off, and our windowless room is cast into deep darkness. My breath catches in my chest. When the fire in the bowl flares up, scattering yellow sparks, it casts shadows on the walls.

  “Look in the mirror,” Croft says, and when I do, his face is in the mirror. I glance up at him quickly, and his expression is the same one reflected in the mirror.

  Which is to say, he’s frowning because I’m not following his directions, either way I look at him. I gaze into his eyes in the mirror, keenly aware of the sparks flying in the bowl, the fire blazing higher than the small bit of kindling should allow. The air fills with the heady scent of sun-heated flowers, and something acrid beneath that, something dark. My nostrils flare as I breathe in the rich iron scent of blood, and panic tightens my chest. Dark magic. Sacrifice.

  Croft’s cut his wrist open, and he holds his arm over the mirror in front of him, letting his blood drip across it. “Eyes on the mirror,” he snaps.

  “I don’t want dark magic.” I put my palm against the mirror, blocking out his gaze, which seems dark and intense.

  “It’s not dark magic.” He speaks through gritted teeth, as if what’s happening hurts him. “It’s older than that.”

  He should have told me before what the spell involved. He knew I wouldn’t want any sacrificial magic; I don’t want Croft to hurt himself for me.

  “What are you doing?” I demand. I look into the mirror, at his face twisted with pain. My breath is short, my head foggy, and even though the mirror is so close to me, his face seems distant.

  “Trust me,” he says.

  My vision narrows to a point, darkness blooming around the edges. I can’t tear my eyes away from his through the mirror, even as I hear my blood pumping through my ears, loud as panic. I reach my hands down for the cold floor, bracing myself, trying to keep myself from falling.

  When darkness rushes up to take me, Croft is there, catching me in his arms before my head can hit the ground. He pulls me into his arms and buries his face in my hair.

  “It’s going to be all right, princess,” he tells me. “I’m here, I’m right here.”

  His gold-flecked brown eyes are so near my face, as he leans over me protectively. That’s the way I like to see his eyes—not through some strange spell, no matter what it might give me back, but close. Intimate. His gaze is warm and worried, and his face is the last thing I see through the haze of my eyelashes before my eyes drift shut.

  Cradled against his chest, it feels like I’m floating. Then sleep rocks me on its waves, reminding me of floating in the ocean. The sun through my eyelids makes everything red. The gentle heat of the sun is on my face, and wet hair tickles my cheeks as the strands drift around my face.

  Someone kisses my forehead, and I breathe in a scent I haven’t smelled in a long time. Mixed with the salt-smell of the water is the scent of honeysuckle and vanilla.

  “Wake up, sweetheart,” my mother says into my ear. “This is no place for a nap.”

  Her voice is teasing. I haven’t heard her voice in so long that I’ve forgotten it: her voice is sweet and lilting.

  Is this a memory or a dream? I don’t know, but I sit up, and when I do, my hands splash down into the waves, sending spray into my face. I draw in a quick breath before I slip under.

  Beneath the waves, all is chaos. The water churns around me as if it’s full of monsters. My eyes sting from the salt water as I kick for the surface.

  “Airren!” Croft yells, his voice so close that my eardrum aches. The door bursts open just as I sit up, groggy-headed and aching. I’m too exhausted to fight it; I lay my head back down on Croft’s shoulder, letting him hold me tight.

  Their voices rise around me, but I’m still stuck on that memory. My mother’s voice. I’d forgotten it, but now I can hear it again, and I keep replaying that wake up, sweetheart. I remember her voice. Tears rise to my eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Cax asks, touching my shoulder as he kneels beside me.

  “Can you cast?” Mycroft asks.

  My head pounds when I sit forward. “Fine. You didn’t tell me—”

  “It’s not dark magic.” Mycroft cuts me off. “None of us would do that. It’s an old spell. From before the first divide.”

  “You knew how I’d feel or you would’ve told me.” My voice is hot. Despite the colossal effort, I heave myself out of his lap and onto the smooth polished hardwood floor.

  “I care that you’re safe,” Mycroft tells me. “Not that you like me.”

  “Good thing, or you’d be gravely disappointed.” It’s a pretty snappy answer given how thick my throat feels right now; I’m wrung out from my dreams and from my panic and from my sadness.

  “Come on, try to cast,” Mycroft says impatiently.

  Even if I slipped under the waves in the end, into nightmares, that moment with my mother again was a gift.

  Maybe there’s a limit on how many gifts a girl like me can have, though. Because when I obediently take Croft’s wand, when Airren sets a spoon on the foor in front of me, when I try to cast, nothing happens.

  Croft curses, getting to his feet and striding across the room as if he can run away from this disappointment. Airren reaches out to pat my knee, comforting.

  “It’s all right, Tera,” Cax promises. “We’ll figure something out.”

  I run my hand down the length of my hair, pulling it in front of my shoulder. It’s my usual fidget, but this time when I reach the ends, they’re damp. Maybe it’s from my tears, in my dreams, but I smell the faintest scent of salt in the air.

  “We will,” I agree.

  My mother’s right. This is no time for me to sleep.

  16

  That night, Stelly and I sit in the lobby in the first floor of Rawl House, trying to do some homework.

  “Stay out of trouble,” Airren tells me, his hand briefly lingering on my shoulder. When I look up into his face, he leans forward as if he wants to kiss me goodbye, before he stops himself.

  “Shouldn’t I say the same to you?” I ask.

  “Stay in public, and stay with Cax,” he says. “I don’t like splitting up, but…” He shrugs.

  He and Croft are going to put a spell on the True headquarters we found.

  “We’ll be fine,” I promise.

  As I do my homework, I keep glancing at the egg, which is nestled in its case on the table between my books and Stelly’s. Cax leans back in his chair, paging through the textbook he balances on his chest, although I’m not sure if he’s reading or daydreaming.

  “What are you going to name it?” Stelly asks me.

  “I think we have to meet first.” I shrug. “I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl…”

  A bubble floats by, drifting back and forth
over the center of the table as if it’s caught in an air current. Cax sits up, holding out his hand.

  “I’ll be right back,” he says as soon as he catches the bubble. The legs of his chair scratch across the floor.

  Stelly raises an eyebrow at his departing back, since he’s swung out of his seat and headed around the corner too quickly for her to raise a verbal complaint. “What is wrong with that weirdo brother of mine now?”

  “He seems off today, doesn’t he?” I know Myroft is still frustrated—which comes across as a general anger-at-the-world—about the failure of our spell. But Cax has been acting oddly since long before our failed attempt to transfer Mycroft’s magic to me.

  She shakes her head. “My mother always says she doesn’t know which one of us worries her more.”

  I smile—Stelly and Cax are both so unique in their own ways—and then I imagine my own mother, if she had been there for my teenage years to drive her quietly crazy, and my smile dies.

  “You’ll meet her when you come home with me for the holidays,” she says.

  “This again?” I grin to soften my words.

  “Well, I want to make sure you come.” She leans in toward me, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Booze. Beaches. Remember?”

  “I do love the shore.”

  “I know,” she says smugly, in a way that makes me think she’s become obsessed with a beach holiday just because of me.

  “What did I do to deserve a friend like you, Stelly?”

  “You put up with me?” she asks. “And you call me Stelly without sounding like you’re mocking me?”

  “I do have some questions for your mom,” I muse.

  Cax comes back. “Hey, Croft forgot some stuff they need for the mission. I’m going to take it to them.”

  “I’ll come.” I close my book, scooting my chair back. “Since I always need adult supervision.”

  It’s a joke, but Cax doesn’t smile. And then his lips part in his usual easy smile, as if there’s something else on his mind and he’s just remembered that he should. “No, it’s all right. You need to study—just stay here and you’ll be fine.”

  “Cax.” My tone is scolding.

  “Tera.” His voice is teasing when he mimics me, saying my name, but then it becomes serious. “Come on—it’s dangerous out there. Stay here, please.”

  It’s dangerous when you don’t have any magic. Cax and I’ve found our way into trouble before. The memory of the two men who attacked us in town makes me restless.

  He rests his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”

  There’s something wrong here. He’s trying to get away from me, and that’s not like Cax. He likes to be entertained, and unlike Mycroft, he hates to be alone. Once again, there’s something these men aren’t telling me.

  But he just taps his fingers against the pages of my open book. “You, study. You can’t afford to take the night off, not even for the Crown.”

  I look up at him—since when do we discuss the Crown in a public space like this?—but he’s already turning away.

  When he’s gone, when I’ve scratched out a few more answers to my homework, I tell Stelly, “I’m going up to my room. I’ve got a headache.”

  “That brother of mine gives you a headache, doesn’t he?” She quirks her lips to one side, tapping them with the eraser on her pencil.

  “He definitely does.” I smile at her as I stack my books.

  “I’m quitting too then,” she says, tossing her pencil into her book. She asks archly, “Are you headed to our room?”

  “Airren’s room.” If I went to our room, she would wonder where I was going when I followed Cax. “I’m just going to bed.”

  “Right,” she says. “If you were just going to bed, you could do that in our room.” ]

  “I sleep better with one of them near me,” I admit.

  “And Airren is your current favorite?”

  “Well, he hasn’t pissed me off lately…” But then I picture Croft, twisting his bloodied wrist, pain etched around the corners of his stoic mouth, and the words seem disloyal. “I don’t understand any of them. They’re all crazy.”

  “Crazy about you.” She slings her purse over her shoulder and then waits for me as I pick up my egg carefully; the blood-red orb is cradled in a crate the boys cobbled together for me.

  “Ha.” Together, the two of us walk across the lobby, which smells like fresh coffee and erasers and ink. It smells like midterms and misery.

  She levels a serious look my way as we head up the steps. “You know they are.”

  I pull a face and she shoves my shoulder gently as we reach the fifth floor. “All right, go sleep in Airren’s bed then.”

  “It’s just sleeping!” I whisper, worried someone will overhear us.

  “Then that’s a waste!” she whispers back. “Good lord, Tera. He’s beautiful and he’s mad about you and I’m pretty sure he knows moves—and spells—no freshman boy is going to know.”

  I shake my head at her, but she grins before I head down the hall toward his room.

  I mean, it does feel like kind of a waste sometimes.

  I close the door to his room behind me. Cax will be down on the second floor if he hasn’t left already, and I stare at the polished wooden door, impatience beating against my chest. I don’t want Stelly to catch me sneaking out. The disappointed look on her face will remind me that I’m doing a terrible job at being The New Tera Donovan. Worse, I don’t want to stumble into Cax; he’s keeping a secret from me—they’re keeping a secret from me—and I need to know what it is.

  As I settle the egg into my book bag and sling it over my shoulder, I muse over which way Cax is most likely to go. If he really is leaving to meet Airren and Croft, he’ll take the path down to town. Beating him down the path is probably my best chance at following him undetected.

  They did say they’d make a spy of me too, after all, didn’t they?

  17

  Cax

  I pack for Mycroft in a hurry, although I can’t resist a bit of sadistic pleasure in packing him the tailored slacks and vest that I gave him last Christmas. He gave me a crossbow.

  “You really wish I didn’t dress like a peasant, hm?” he’d asked, folding the vest back into the box.

  “And you really think the ideal date night is on the range.”

  He’d pulled a face at that—Croft didn’t think of us as dating. He was a complicated lunatic, that one, as Tera was clearly discovering. As much as Croft and I had a complicated and deep friendship—with benefits—it seemed like he cared for Tera in a different way.

  And I was happy about it. Maybe Tera could tear down the last of his walls and bring him back into this world. Airren said he’d been different since the death of his brother, and I always wondered about the Croft I’d never known, the one who hadn’t yet been broken, then healed crooked.

  I rifle through his top drawer for his brass shield cuffs and his collapsing bo staff and throw them on top, then zip the bag shut and toss it over my shoulder.

  Of all the times for Raila to contact me, she picked the worst, but that’s to be expected. She always kept me off balance.

  That was easy when I was sixteen. I’m a different man now.

  I try to remember her face, pulling it up in my memory, but instead Tera’s face rises in front of me. In my mind, Tera’s luminous eyes are clouded with suspicion—the same way they were a few minutes ago, when I excused myself. Lord, I hate lying to her.

  But if telling her the truth means damning her to exile all over again, well, it’s an easy choice. Even if it hurts.

  I throw Croft’s bag over my shoulder and head for the end of the hall and the servants’ stairs, which are now renamed emergency stairs but that doesn’t really change the legacy. I flick my fingers, breaking the spell that sounds an alarm, and push the door open. These stairs are narrow, wooden and musty, and I jog quickly down them to exit into the clear, bright night air.

  The moon is low-slung to
night, as bright as a silver coin suspended in the air, and it looks as if it brushes the white treetops. The night feels oppressive overhead as I circle the building and follow the cobblestone path into town.

  Croft and Airren are waiting for me on a dark street halfway between the square and campus.

  “Thanks.” Croft takes the bag and slings it over his shoulder. “I didn’t want to see Tera before I left.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugs one shoulder. That gesture doesn’t mean he doesn’t know; it means I can’t be arsed to talk about my feelings.

  There’s no one who hates lying to Tera as much as Croft does.

  “There’s no point in getting her hopes up,” Airren says. “This lead might be a dead end. And even if we find her man from Avalon, we can’t be sure he took her magic.”

  “Worth a shot, though.” I stick my hands in my pockets. “Croft. Try not to kill anyone out there, all right?”

  “Of course not,” he grumbles. “Killing would be counterproductive.”

  He claps my shoulder with one hand, nods to Airren, and heads toward the outskirts of town.

  “Did you…” I nod toward the bakery, above which the True have set up their camp.

  “Yeah.” Airren hesitates. “Are you all right using your old relationship with Raila to…”

  “She deserves it,” I cut in.

  “Yeah, absolutely.” Airren claps my shoulder as if he’s pushed whatever doubts he has aside. “Good luck. I’ll have your back if things go south.”

  When I was sixteen, Raila was thirty. She wormed her way into my life, seduced me, and tried to turn me True.

  I wouldn’t have minded except for the True bullshit.

  “Thanks.” I throw him a wave over my shoulder as I head off to meet her at the lion’s fountain. It’s just like Airren. He might have a second’s hesitation over sending me to trap an old lover, but in the end, he’ll do what it takes to get the mission done. He doesn’t get too tangled up about feelings.

  Croft’s always loved him for that, but these days, I think it’s a strain between these two men as close as brothers.