Darkbound

by Scott Tracey

  Only … that was exactly what the Prince managed to do. He spun and dipped and pranced like this all was a dance, and he was the only one who was enjoying himself. The Witchers knew exactly what they were doing and had their timing down perfectly. He shouldn’t have been able to dodge everything they threw at him. But he did all the same.

  Quinn called out directions I didn’t understand, things about gnomes and numbers that made no sense to anyone who wasn’t a Witcher. But with every command, the tactics the army displayed changed. Magical strike attacks—fire and force—were abandoned and area attacks taken up. The ground around us trembled as multiple shouts severed the land, created chasms and gashes as the blacktop concrete split apart.

  The Prince continued his dance, running and sliding and evading everything that came his way. The Witchers’ attacks were controlled and careful: despite the fact that everything they threw at him missed, the collateral damage was minimal. Spells faltered and vanished before they could strike one of the hospital buildings, the light posts, even the landscaping. Only the parking lot itself was damaged, torn up and split apart like the gates to the Abyss were going to open right here.

  Twice, just when it seemed that two or three attacks were going to meet with the Prince in the middle, he shimmered and vanished, only to reappear five feet to the right and completely unmarked.

  Once, an attack veered wide, arcing towards both the Prince … and us. By the time we saw the spell (which was like storm clouds and purple lightning), it was too late for Jenna and me to even move. But the Prince surprised me again, darting behind and scooping us up, one in each arm. He leaped backwards, five or maybe ten feet off the ground. And despite the fact that I was the better part of six feet two inches, in his hands I was an infant who could be easily moved and carried.

  “Watch yourselves,” the Prince said, the harsh current washing my features out in red and a sudden snap of anger. Shame welled up in me only long enough for me to realize that he wasn’t chastising us but Quinn’s soldiers. “What if you’d hit one of them?” the Prince called, sounding outraged. “You could have hurt him.”

  Quinn held up a hand, and immediately the incipient magic in the air faltered and vanished, recalled back into the ether it had come from. There was an impasse, and it had everything to do with Jenna and me. The Prince’s arm was still around me, hot and disturbingly comfortable against my skin. He smelled like my favorite body wash, but on his skin the scent was somehow more, the most perfect version of itself. He released us, then turned to look at me, as if he’d forgotten that he was one against dozens. As if it didn’t matter.

  A discordant note in the symphony flowing from the Prince’s mouth lasted only as long as his eyes on mine. The first two fingers of his right hand sliced through the air to point somewhere over his shoulder and a piercing note hit my eardrums like Charybdis itself swallowed me whole.

  I had been ripped between points and from one version of the world to another so often by now that the transition hit me no harder than a bit of turbulence, but Jenna grabbed my arm in surprise.

  One moment we were in the shadow of the main building hiding amidst some of the wreckage, and the next, we were on the roof of the hospital overlooking the battlefield.

  There was a moment when it looked like Jenna was about to lose her dinner all over the side of the hospital, but the queasy look soon passed and she straightened.

  Quinn spun around once he realized we were gone, but he and the Witchers were like ants to us, all the way up here. “Hey!” I shouted, waving my hands, but the sound didn’t carry that far. Up here, the wind was more ferocious, angry and sulking like Cole on a summer school morning.

  “He wants us out of the way?” Jenna tucked some of her hair behind her ear, but the wind just whipped it out again like a wild serpent refusing to be tamed.

  “I don’t think we really know anything about what he wants,” I replied. We tried the only door to be found on the roof, but it was locked from the inside, and when Jenna tried the only unlocking spell she knew, it didn’t work. Because there were so many different kinds of locks, there were an equal number of spells that each catered to a different type. And Jenna’s spell could barely jiggle the handle.

  There was nothing to do but stare at the battle below us.

  Someone would call out a command, and then as a unit the Witchers would lob a series of attacks, their magic rocking through the air as loud as any jet engine. So many attacks, fire and ice, lightning and force, shadows and light. Dozens of attacks, all spread out on different levels, different heights, different wavelengths. No one could escape all of it.

  But that was exactly what the Prince did. He leapt through the fray with a triumphant trill, feet catching on to empty air and propelling him off the ground. Some attacks he hopped over, a few he rolled underneath, and then there were the ones where he stretched himself out until he was no more than an inch wide and slid between them.

  To their credit, the Witchers never broke ranks. Each wave of attacks was just as calm and focused as the ones before.

  But with each round, and the way the Prince darted around them, the Witchers shifted position. Sometimes they stepped back. Sometimes they moved for cover, as wayward magical strikes hurtled their way. It took several minutes for me to see the pattern. For me to understand why the Prince wasn’t returning any of the attacks himself. The Witchers, all thirty of them, kept inching closer to one another and none of them had realized it yet. The Prince wasn’t just dodging their attacks. He was herding them. And that could only mean one thing.

  “Oh no,” I whispered, once I realized what was going on.

  Jenna leaned over the ledge, seeing almost instantly what had taken me minutes. “He’s playing with them.” And then. “He’s going to kill them.” She grabbed for my hand, threading her fingers through mine. “Come on. We have to do something. We have to help.”

  “What can we do?” I tried to pull my hand free, but she wouldn’t let go. “We need to stay out of it.” The image of the spell hurtling towards us, and the way the Prince had leaped into its path, rather than letting us be hurt. I wasn’t a coward by any sense of the imagination, but this wasn’t our fight. It wasn’t something we could fight. If it was something that wanted to kill us, then maybe we would have stood a chance. We could have used the curse for some good.

  But if that spell had come any closer, it might not have been a demon of the Abyss that was destroyed by its activation, but one of the Witchers. Maybe even one of the ones we knew.

  She grabbed me by the face, and I expected fury or something like it, but Jenna was calm, controlled. “Listen to me. He’s going to kill them. Quinn’s down there. Nick too. People we know. I know you hate me, and I know you hate this, but it’s the only thing we can do right now. We have to help them. Somehow.”

  “What do you even think I’m going to be able to do?” I asked, flustered and frustrated. I didn’t know spells. I didn’t have nearly the same kind of drive that Justin and Jenna did, the hunger to unravel every spell they could find, to teach themselves everything that they could. I knew about as little as I could help, and Jenna knew that.

  “We’re stronger together,” Jenna said firmly. “We’re part of the same coven, Mal. Together we’re more capable than either one of us on our own.”

  I didn’t know what she expected me to do but listen. It turned out that was all she wanted.

  “Close your eyes,” she said, and I did. “Feel your heartbeat. Feel the part of you that’s alive and kicking, the adrenaline that’s in your veins right now.” She took my hand in hers, pressed it against her neck. “Now feel my heartbeat. You and I, we may not share any blood, but we’re family. I’m the only one who gets to make fun of you for your demon boyfriend.”

  The laughter escaped me suddenly, and it should have broken the moment between us, but it had the opposite effect. The more Jenna talked, the
deeper I fell inside myself.

  “There’s a cord that connects us, light like angel feathers that will stretch to the ends of the earth if it needs to.” Her voice was low and serious, the perfect voice to be hypnotized to. “And with our hands on this cord, we can access the Coven bond.

  “It’s just there, it’s under the surface. The five of us are connected in a way that no one but us will ever understand. For me, the four of you are like fires burning in the distance. When I close my eyes and concentrate, I can feel you somewhere just beyond my eyelids.”

  I concentrated, trying to use the sounds and feel of our heartbeats to tap into the hidden world she was referring to. But in the dark of my mind, there was nothing. No fire, no feeling. No connection to any of the others, least of all Jenna.

  Her words grew hesitant, slow to regain their fire and passion. They stumbled, the truth hard against her lips. “I hate you sometimes, but Justin never will. And I hate that because someday he might decide I’m not worth fighting for anymore, and you’ll win. And some days it feels like he’s all I have, that he’s the only thing that keeps me here. I don’t know what I’ll be without him, and what’s worse is that someday I know

  I’ll have to find out. We can’t be together forever.”

  The confession did what Jenna’s soothing tone could not. My mouth opened, and words spilled out. “None of you know me. I play the part and give you the only mask I can, even though it’s not enough. And there’s so much fear. Sometimes I can’t push it down fast enough, it grows like weeds and the only thing I can do is drown it out with more anger. And I’m always angry, and always frustrated, and none of you will ever know why.”

  And there was no time for guilt or blame, because even as I confessed to the person I trusted least in the circle, my mind expanded, like another world opening up inside my brain, a world of more than three dimensions, where light and air were the same thing. I couldn’t just feel the connection with Jenna, I could see it. It stretched far beyond the two of us. I could feel Justin inside the hospital, sleeping and dormant, his presence a gray node inside my head. Cole and Bailey, each slow to sleep and dreaming fitfully, bright spots even in a world that already seemed composed entirely of light.

  There was more to it, though. The Coven bond between us was right and fitting, but there were other ties. A chain made from tar and melted black licorice, that bound us hand to hand. Another that was a strange sort of gravity, as if our bones were all pieces of a greater whole, just waiting to be dragged together. Even now, I could feel my forearm being pulled towards Jenna’s leg. The femur, maybe, or her ankle bone. And one I couldn’t see at all, could only feel in the way it made my soul shiver and stand on end, a thunderstorm of potential all around me.

  It wasn’t the bonds themselves that fascinated me. It was the layer of something between them. A spinning stream of energy that slowed when I focused on it. Green and gold and silver, lights or threads that separated when I focused on them, when the spinning slowed and I realized they were symbols, or something like them, spinning so fast they’d blurred together.

  I’d always had a knack for reading sigils and symbols of magic. It was just something I never tried to hone, because …

  magic. Sometimes I could look at a symbol and discern something about it without even knowing what it was for. When we first came to Carrow Mill and the Moonset symbol started appearing everywhere, I could feel it there under the surface. Electricity and something living, the meaning behind the word.

  There were thousands of them … not quite in my head, and not in the heads of the others, but somewhere in between. A streaming circle of something greater than all of us, trapped just outside my head like a halo.

  Something told me Jenna couldn’t see it. If she had, if Jenna knew it was there, she would have reached for it already. Abused it. Taken it apart and figured out how all the pieces fit together. As it was now, it was beautiful. A pretty display of lights and colors that watched over us like guardian angels. This could be the curse, I found myself thinking. If I can figure out a way to take it apart, I could still find my freedom.

  “You feel it, don’t you?” Jenna’s voice intruded on my headspace, but for the first time in my life, I didn’t mind. I opened my eyes, and viewed the chaos below. The battle continued to rage, only now the violence was extreme. I vaguely remembered the building rocking once or twice while I’d been focused internally, the feel of the building taking a hit.

  The thirty Witchers had been spread across the parking lot, taking strategic placements to cover all angles of escape. But now they were all on one side, and the attacks came more infrequently now, because everything they sent forward was repelled towards one of their colleagues.

  It was easy to pick Quinn out of the crowd. He still stood at the front of his little army, putting himself in harm’s way before any of the others.

  With the Coven bond racing between us, it wasn’t anything like what I thought. Jenna was there, in my head, but she wasn’t in my thoughts or intruding somewhere she didn’t belong. Instead, it was like the two of us had expanded until we were greater than the sums of our bodies, equally sharing all the space between us. She was part of me, and I was part of her. We were separate, and yet together.

  He doesn’t just want to kill them. He wants me to watch. My thoughts took the place of my voice, but I knew she could hear only what I wanted her to hear.

  The Prince looked up to us, and even though it was too far to say for sure, I was almost positive he was looking me in the eyes. Making sure I watched. Held off his victory until the audience was primed and ready.

  Is there something you can do? He likes you. Jenna was uncomfortable with the idea. Hell, I wasn’t exactly a fan of it myself. But she was right.

  I grimaced, the momentary lull was over, and now the fight had regained its fervor. The Prince stopped obeying gravity altogether, and when attacks came from too many directions he jumped into the air and ran on the air itself, raising and dipping, despite the fact that there was nothing holding up his feet. One time, he jumped and ran parallel to the side of the hospital for almost a dozen floors before he pushed off and swan-dived back towards the ground.

  Now that he knew I was watching, the Prince’s tactics changed. No longer was he so worried about dodging attacks and staying on the move. He allowed things to hit him, though they never slowed him down. He walked through spells meant to contain him, and wardings meant to hold him off. With Jenna’s knowledge at my beck and call, I could see and understand things about the battle that I would never have known about by myself.

  The only sound we could hear all the way up here, despite the rushing wind all around us, were moments of the Prince’s serenade, now a sharp thing of cymbal clangs and percussive slaps.

  He doesn’t like. He thinks he loves me. Because it was true. The Prince loved the idea of being in love. The idea of ownership, and how one was the same as the other. He thought I belonged to him, because he thought he knew the person I

  really was.

  Maybe for a minute I had believed him. Maybe I, too, had wondered. But attacking Justin had changed everything. That wasn’t love. That was psychosis.

  The Prince advanced on Quinn suddenly, the pair of them dancing like tiny toy soldiers.

  “Mal,” Jenna warned, her voice rising.

  Quinn didn’t back down the way the Prince had. When the demon invaded his personal space, Quinn held his ground. He would not be moved. But the Prince wasn’t after intimidation. I saw movement, but couldn’t see what at this distance. But when I saw the flash of metal in the demon’s hand, I knew what had happened. He’d taken Quinn’s knife from him. And yet still Quinn stood there, still like a statue. Frozen, or unafraid. Either way, he was in trouble.

  The knife raised, glowing holy white as the sun struck it, and just before the Prince brought it back down, knowledge poured into me from Jenna’s mind. We b
oth screamed at the same time, her the spell that would amplify my voice, and mine a commanding “STOP!” that reverberated across the parking lot, the woods on the far side, and all around us into Carrow Mill itself. My voice was a thunder crack and a sonic boom, and the ground shook after its passing.

  The Prince stayed his hand, eyes again turning towards me. Quinn was also looking, but if he said anything, his words didn’t carry.

  “They raised arms against me,” the Prince pouted, his words carried softly on small gusts of air, traveling whole and unbroken up the entire length of the hospital. It was like we were only inches apart instead of a dozen stories. “A lesson needs to be taught, my human.”

  “I won’t let you kill them,” I said, and though the words barely left the roof before the wind ripped them away and apart, I saw something change on the Prince’s face down below. A frown, maybe, or a darkening of the eyes. Something unpleasant.

  “You cannot stop me from this, my Malcolm.”

  But the spinning wheel of knowledge above the crown of my head begged to differ. One moment it was a wheel with a thousand different spokes and the next it was a book with thousands of pages, the pages flying right to left until they stopped and there was a symbol in my head, crowding out my thoughts and tearing memories loose from where they’d always been stored.

  It was something too big for my head, a symbol that was more than me and more than … everything. It wasn’t magic the way I thought of magic. It was more. It was real in a way that nothing else was, more fluid and eternal than anything else I’d ever known. It was what I thought power must have felt like to the Abyssal Prince, and how callous a god felt next to a Toyota.

  “Mal?” Jenna said. Then again, worry in her voice. “Malcolm?”

  My vision sharpened to an impossible level, and I could see every detail of the battlefield all at once. Quinn’s face showed no fear, but the droplet of sweat on his forehead suggested otherwise.