Defiant

by Karina Sumner-Smith

  The boy made a noise that was too small and frightened to be a cry, curling in on himself and raising his little hands to ward off her magic. Of course I won’t hurt you. The words echoed from impossibly far away, and Xhea wanted to laugh, or scream, or cry. She desperately tried to shut down her power, or draw back her hand, and could not.

  “Xhea?” Daye asked, once and again. She knew the woman could see nothing of the ghost, nothing of Xhea’s magic, only Xhea reaching for nothing, struggling against nothing as tears cascaded down her face.

  Then a coil of dark magic touched the ghost and the tether that bound him. Xhea felt a short, sharp shock, hard enough to knock her to the ground, and she gasped desperately for air.

  She heard Ieren’s scream, even through the walls that separated them. It was the rage she heard first; the word came almost as an afterthought: “No!”

  That Daye heard. She leapt to her feet and knocked the chair aside, pulling open the door with speed Xhea could only envy. When Ieren came barreling down the hall and through the door, Torrence was right on his heels.

  “What did you—” Torrence began

  Ieren screamed over him. “You can’t, he’s mine! Mine, mine, mine!”

  Xhea recoiled from his blind rage.

  “I didn’t—” she started. “Ieren, I—”

  The little ghost whimpered as Ieren turned on him. “Don’t you ever talk to her!” The ghost curled in upon himself further, cowering at his tether’s farthest extent. “Don’t even speak,” Ieren said, and the words had the sound of a command. “Don’t say anything at all.”

  Ieren rounded on Xhea. His lips were drawn back from his teeth like an animal’s snarl, and his hands, when he reached for her, were wreathed with black. “He’s mine! Get your own bondling—you can’t steal mine, you can’t, you can’t!”

  He grabbed her by the shoulders, and Xhea cried out, for this time his touch hurt. Torrence tried to intercede and drew back, yelping, as if his hand had been burned.

  Xhea could feel Ieren do something with his magic, and her own power vanished in response. She shuddered at the sudden absence and weakness, and fell the rest of the way to the floor. Still Ieren shouted, telling her that she was a thief and a liar and that she deserved to die. In his anger, his power flowed. She knew that strong emotion could bid the power rise—and that when it did, it felt like nothing in the world might stop it again.

  No one could stop him, Xhea realized, if she could not; and she trembled helplessly on the floor. So much dark magic could kill—swift and sure, if not painless. Even the brief touch of that swirling dark magic against Torrence’s hand had the man shuddering and shivering.

  At last Ieren drew back, his breath rough in his throat. Only then did he seem to see the haze of dark magic that surrounded them like a cloud.

  “No,” he whispered, and for a moment he sounded afraid, so afraid. “Oh, no. I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”

  She watched as he visibly gained control of himself, taking a deep breath and closing his eyes. His magic contracted, darkening around him like a living shadow before vanishing even from Xhea’s sight. It was not enough. Ieren had started to quiver, and he swayed as she watched, suddenly unsteady on his feet. She knew all too well the pain that made his mouth turn down at the edges and creased those lines into his forehead.

  Ieren looked at her, all anger drained away. “I don’t want to die,” he said, as if he’d heard her thought. It sounded like an apology. Then he turned, grabbed hold of the spelled tether that joined him to the ghost, and pulled the boy struggling toward him.

  The ghost cried out—or tried to, his mouth opening in a silent scream. A scream, Xhea realized, that Ieren had commanded him not to voice. Even without the sound, there was no ignoring the pain on his face, nor his fear as he tried with insubstantial hands to push Ieren away. And for nothing. His hands passed through Ieren as if he, too, were nothing but smoke, just a shadow in all this darkness. Ieren seemed not even to feel his touch.

  Instead, he pulled the boy nearer and nearer again, reaching not for his ghostly body but the line that joined them. And it was no tether, for Xhea watched as Ieren used it like a drinking straw, drawing hard, fingers grasping, as he began to steal the ghost’s energy, his being, his very self through that line. She could see it go, a nameless something moving along the binding from the ghost to Ieren. Ieren absorbed it, drank it down.

  Eater of ghosts.

  She hadn’t been wrong, hadn’t been wrong at all, and that truth terrified her. Xhea tried to get to her feet, but her cane had rolled away, and she was trembling, horrified.

  Ieren was not so much larger than the ghost, but he held the ghost effortlessly, despite the dead boy’s struggles. As she watched, Ieren seemed to grow stronger, steadier—while the ghost faded, becoming paler and less real as he screamed and screamed in silence.

  Not the blindness nor the magic-vision, not the skin that hurt to touch, not seeing ghosts—this was what she was. This was what her power did.

  Oh, sweetness, Xhea thought. Ieren’s a monster—and so am I.

  Because watching him, beneath her horror and revulsion and sudden, desperate fear, she felt something else: hunger deep as her bones and as inescapable. While she cried out to even see the ghost so clearly suffering, some part of her was … envious. That was the most terrifying thing of all.

  Through her mental turmoil, another thought surfaced—and it cut through the rest like a well-honed knife. Why aren’t you trying to stop him?

  Ieren dropped the ghost and turned his back as if the boy were nothing more than a wrapper for a meal he’d tired of eating. Ieren took one slow breath and another, and looked up. He seemed, if not healthy, then very much alive. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes were bright, and his movements came quick and easy.

  “I’m sorry for scaring you,” he said, all signs of both rage and weakness gone. Xhea, sprawled on the floor with both Daye and Torrence standing over her with knives drawn, could only stare. “I thought you were trying to take him. I’m sorry—I know that you wouldn’t do something like that, right?” Ieren shrugged and smiled, as if everything were perfectly all right.

  The ghost was weeping. Curled into a ball at his tether’s far end, the dead boy clutched his head and covered his face as he sobbed and sobbed in perfect silence. When Xhea looked, the tips of those fingers tangled in his dark hair had begun to grow transparent.

  Xhea’s own hunger was little abated—eased, only, by the extra few feet of distance between her and the ghost. She shook, and her breath was short and shallow, and sweat beaded her forehead. She pushed herself back, reaching for her cane as she tried to rise, tried to get away.

  Too weak to do either.

  “Daye …?” Xhea started, but could only reach out an empty hand as darkness returned to claim her.

  Shai had only just started her nightly practice when the screaming began.

  After the long day, she had returned to Edren’s roof to practice her spellwork—not out of any desire, but only because she couldn’t think where else she could go, what else she could possibly do. Xhea’s small room had been familiar, if not exactly comfortable; now, Shai couldn’t bring herself to go near. The halls and common rooms were a hive of activity in the wake of the fighters’ return; some gathered to tend wounds or mourn losses, while others laughed and drank and predicted Rown’s eventual fall. In all the skyscraper, only the roof felt calm and quiet; only the roof felt like it was hers.

  Later, she’d wonder if she would have heard the screams had she been lost in one of her spell experiments; as it was, the faint, panicked sound was on the very edge of her hearing. She froze, listening. For a long moment, there was nothing.

  Then it came again: her name, shouted from impossibly far away.

  Xhea? Shai reached for the tether. Habit. Her hands hit empty air and again she felt that sense of dislocation to find herself unbound and alone.

  She spun, as if someone might have snuck up behind her while s
he wasn’t looking, hid behind the stacked storage crates or slipped into one of the aircars parked beneath the canvas awning. But there was no one. Shai stepped to the skyscraper’s edge and looked at the streets below, dreading what she might see in the shadows.

  Her father wasn’t—he couldn’t—

  But no, as she stared Shai realized that the sound was not coming from some distant, darkened street, but a window cracked open some floors below her. Realized, too, that she recognized the voice: Lorn.

  She released her hold on the world around her, and fell. She didn’t have far to go. One floor, another, and the sounds grew louder; Shai slowed, slipped through an apartment wall and out into the empty hall beyond. She heard clang of metal on metal, of grunts and scuffling feet and a body hitting the floor. She sped forward, turned the corner.

  Chaos.

  Three attackers were still standing, each clad in dark clothing, their faces obscured. One held knives; another wielded a blade long enough to be a sword, magic gleaming along its edge. Emara held off both, her own blades whirling, while Lorn fought another attacker in the hall’s far end. Shai could just see a body lying behind him.

  Closer, near the elevators, a fourth attacker had been cut down.

  And oh, the blood. It should not have shocked her, given the chaos, but it did. The smears of blood on the wall’s ancient wallpaper, parallel streaks of brilliant red across all those pale, faded flowers. Blood slippery across the floor, smeared by scuffling feet. Blood pooling, dark red and glistening, from the still figure near the end of the hall.

  Through it all, she could hear Lorn’s voice, shouting her name over and over.

  “Shai!” he cried, then grunted as his attacker pressed close to grapple.

  Lorn held no weapon. He wore only shorts, his legs and arms and the bare expanse of his tattooed chest entirely unprotected. Already he had been wounded: blood ran from defensive cuts on his hands and forearms, and a deep slice above his heart; blood mixed with his sweat.

  His only defense was a spell, clearly woven in haste, held before his upraised hands. It was a protective spell meant to turn aside objects approaching above a rough force limit; but it was thin now, if it had ever been strong, and flickered around the edges. Flickered, too, every time the knife struck the near-invisible half-dome, and grew weaker with every strike.

  Again his attacker tried to close, pressing in with both body and blade, and Lorn struggled under the onslaught. He was pushed back, muscles straining, his feet sliding across the floor.

  Emara, closer, had no spells, no flicker of light around her hands—but she was armed. Like Lorn, she seemingly wore only the clothes she slept in, a light top and shorts, and from the way she moved Shai could only imagine that anything heavier would have been in her way. She held a curved blade as long as her forearm in each hand, shining silver moons that spun around her like extensions of her body. She was never still, the blades gleaming blurs that rose and fell—parrying a thrust, slicing at an exposed side, creating a whirling wall of steel past which the attackers could not pass.

  Xhea had told Shai that Emara had been a fighter in her younger years, a gladiator in Edren’s arena—and despite the woman’s height and the muscled expanse of her chest and arms, despite the scars on her arms and the way that she moved, Shai had not truly believed it until that moment.

  A black-clad figure fell at her feet, choking on blood, and Emara stepped back, making the other opponent climb over—or stand upon—his fallen comrade to come at her. She blocked the hall with her body and blades alone, protecting her husband and the body over which he stood.

  They were not just attackers, Shai realized, but assassins—for it seemed that their only mission here was death. As Edren security arrived, shouting, shock sticks raised, Emara’s second opponent did not try to flee nor turn to face the new threat, only pressed harder against Emara’s defense.

  “Shai!” Lorn cried again. “Shai, here!” His spell flickered and nearly failed.

  He was not alerting her, she realized, but calling desperately for her help.

  Shai rushed forward, through the attacker and his blade, through Emara, to go to Lorn. He must have felt her approach, for he suddenly fell silent and in his expression flared something that looked horribly like hope. Shai pushed aside the fear her heart birthed at that look, pushed aside the uncertainty, and moved to stand at his side.

  Her only attempts at reinforcement—bolstering the faltering healing spells on Xhea’s knee in the weeks past—had gone terribly wrong. Even when she’d managed not to twist the spell-lines or cause Xhea pain, she’d overloaded the spells, sometimes destroying them entirely.

  She knew nothing of defensive spells; there was no time to learn. As she hesitated, Lorn’s spell flared and flickered, letting the attacker’s knife slip through to score a deep line across the palms of Lorn’s upraised hands.

  Don’t think.

  She touched the shimmering spell-lines. As the attacker’s blade rose and fell through her, Shai remembered the feel of a thunderstorm surrounding Allenai, the night-black clouds and the harsh cut of lightning across the sky, the storm’s fury against her window—and that window and the Tower walls holding it all effortlessly back.

  She was the window. She was the wall.

  Lorn and the attacker both cried out as her barrier flared into being, lightning-bright in the confines of the hall. It had taken the space of a breath—if that. Yet in Lorn’s bleeding hands now gleamed a great arc of power, almost wide enough to span the hall from side to side. It glowed white gold, transcending the magical spectrum. The attacker flinched, shielding his eyes.

  Leaving Lorn to hold back his assailant, Shai rushed to the man who lay on the floor—and it was a man, sprawled boneless as he had fallen. He wore a light robe, cotton pants, and a T-shirt. Pajamas, she thought—but she could not tell what color they had once been, so soaked were they with blood. The fabric was red and black and slicked to his chest, and a slim knife handle still jutted up from the arches of his ribs. But she saw the weak rise and fall of his chest, and she crouched by his side.

  Looked down at his face.

  And stopped, breathless.

  Verrus Edren. They’ve tried to kill Verrus Edren. If the rough, wet sound of his breathing was to be believed, they might still succeed. In that single, frozen moment, Shai understood why Lorn had called to her so desperately.

  Don’t think, she commanded. Act. She reached out with glowing hands.

  But how could she silence her mind’s sudden clamor, or still the questions that whirled unanswered? She knew the importance of this life—here, now. She knew what hung in the balance.

  Shai placed her hands above his chest as if she could touch him, feel his blood or the sodden weave of his shirt or the rise and fall of his stuttering breath. Focus, she thought—the same instruction that she’d so often given Xhea. But it was only now, her thoughts running circles as a man bled out beneath her intangible hands, that she understood why Xhea had struggled.

  Blades clashed, and Emara cried out in pain, and there came a sizzle from Lorn’s spell as the attacker tried to force his way past its weakest edges. Shai pushed it all away and focused only on the magic as it flowed from her hands, her heart, her self. Weaving that power on instinct, letting it sink into his ailing flesh to map out the injuries beneath.

  Verrus’s lung had been punctured and he struggled to breathe; blood frothed on his lips. So close, she could see his many stab wounds, like bloody little mouths gaping wide, on his arms and shoulders and neck. But it was the way the blood pumped from the wound in his chest that told her that the little blade had plunged deep enough to nick something important. Artery? Vein? Mind scrabbling at details, she couldn’t remember the difference.

  Doesn’t matter. Yet when she went to set the spell-anchors along the deepest wound’s edges, her magic seemed to slide off, entirely out of her control. Steady, she thought. You can do this. She tried again, and again her magic was repelled. And
a third time: for whenever she attempted to push her power toward the wound and the knife within it, something pushed back. Pushed away.

  Resistance.

  Shai opened her eyes, not knowing when she had closed them, and looked down in surprise. Only then did she recognize the blade.

  She had thought the knife small, especially in contrast to the heavier, longer weapons that the attackers now wielded. The knife’s hilt was slender and bloody, the blade fully embedded in Verrus Edren’s chest, but oh yes, she knew that shape. It was a narrow silver blade, an ancient thing that folded neatly into a handle inlaid with time-clouded mother of pearl.

  Xhea’s knife.

  “No,” Shai whispered, unheard. For she knew that Xhea had carried this knife in a jacket pocket above her heart for years; and that it had, over time, absorbed some shadow of her power. Now, searching for it, she could feel the knife’s presence, the faintest pressure against the palm of her hand. The feel of dark magic. No poison, this, but something far worse. If her magic, bright magic, told things to live and grow and flourish, Xhea’s magic said the opposite: to falter, to weaken.

  To die.

  The knife held little of that power anymore, but it was enough. Already the flesh still in contact with the metal was beginning to die—she could see it, feel it, as life and magic both began to slip from the cells that touched the silver blade.

  Unthinking, Shai grabbed the knife to pull it from Verrus Edren’s chest—she would deal with the blood as it came—only to have her hand pass through. It hurt, the knife hilt’s passage through her reaching hand, hurt as nothing had hurt her since her death. Gasping, Shai drew back.

  Lorn or Emara—either of them might touch the blade, if quickly—

  Before she could do more than turn, Verrus began to choke. Blood spattered his lips and his chest heaved as he slowly drowned in his own blood. He coughed and gasped for air, mouth opening and closing like a landed fish. His eyes fluttered open as a look of pain and disbelief—and yes, fear—crossed his face. He made to speak, one hand reaching—