Bound Powers

by Saruuh Kelsey

  Gabi couldn’t tell if the elf could even hear her but his eyes were fixed on her. She swallowed, bracing as a wave of dizziness swept over her. “Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

  Gabi swayed, choking on the black smoke as it filled her lungs, her head hammering. Her arm felt dead but she managed to raise it, to aim the taser in the elf’s direction and use her body weight to propel it forward, below the elf’s ribs. As the electrified ends met the elf, he jerked and grabbed her shoulders. Pain, a cold, slithering corruptness shot through her heart. Like before but so much worse. Her magic reeled and guttered. She staggered back, tears in her eyes, but he would not let her go.

  Charred paper flaked away from the elf’s skin as Gus managed to pull her from the elf’s grip, struggling to hold her weight when her feet slid on the damp grass. When the world stopped spinning and Gabi looked back, the elf was a tumble of broken wood on the ground. The taser had collapsed him. Gabi felt a different sort of ache behind her ribs. The elf was corrupted but he’d still been an elf, and Gabi had killed him.

  Gabi flinched at movement in the corner of her eye, spinning to meet it even as she swayed and leant heavily on Gus. But it was only Salma, leaping over a crevice in the grass. She looked from Gus to Gabi with hard, worried eyes.

  Gabi had an awful feeling she was going to pass out from overexerting her environmental magic but she blinked until she could see the garden without it wobbling or duplicating, and scanned every corner. The killer was really gone. She’d done it.

  But Salma disagreed. She said, “That was too easy.”

  Gabi, the world tilting around her, begged to differ.

  “He fell apart so easy.” Salma frowned. “How could he kill all those people—the ones he killed must have fought. Would they not find a way to do what you just did?”

  Gabi did not want to agree with her.

  “Um,” Gus said, sounding unsettled. “Did either of you ... see stuff when it looked at you?”

  “No,” Gabi said, frowning as her head swam.

  “Yes,” Salma said at the same time. Gabi’s mind was too slow, her head spinning too fast to understand. “I saw a memory.” Her voice was clipped.

  “I saw these shadows in a church ... oh shit. I’m pretty sure it was my recurring dream. Did that thing just try to dream murder us? Jesus.”

  “Tried,” Salma said. “It did not succeed.”

  Gabi was too dizzy and weak to get her brain to figure out the significance of all this.

  “So, what now?” Gus asked, readjusting his arm around Gabi. “That thing fit with what your mum told us, Salma. It’s a fucked up elf—we were told to find a fucked up elf and we did. It has to be the killer. And I, for one, don’t think this was fucking easy. Look at Pride, she’s out of it.”

  Gabi began to protest but Salma’s phone buzzed. Gabi understood as soon as Salma swore—figured out this was a distraction. Her world was a blur, her head dizzy and her body weak, but Salma was right. It had been too easy, was meant to be too easy to keep them occupied while—

  Mrs. Nazari had told Gabi to protect Joy, had said they wanted her, the killer and his master. And Gabi had let the coven separate. She swore, the sound little more than a slur. She had to get her shit together, had to hold onto consciousness. As Gus began moving again, much quicker, towards the car Gabi guessed, she dragged her eyelids apart with great effort and pinned Salma with a look, mostly because it was easier than turning her head to meet Gus’s eyes. “Spell … keep … awake.”

  “No,” she replied instantly.

  “Yeah, that’s risky, Pride,” Gus agreed.

  Anger rushed through Gabi; she clenched her jaw, forced words out. “Joy—is in danger. I need … a spell.”

  Salma seemed to remember all at once what her mum had said about Joy being hunted. “Get in the car. Gus, you drive. I’ll throw together a spell.”

  Gabi was manhandled into the backseat.

  “Do you have everything you need?” Gus asked, turning the keys in the ignition. The car filled Gabi’s head with sound, but for the first time she realised the pressure and pain of being near the corrupted elf had gone.

  “I can make it work,” Salma replied in a steely voice.

  As the car peeled out and sped down the road, Gabi felt around for the lever to wind down the window, and managed even sprawled over the seat to crank it open enough for cold, blustery air to slap her in the face. This was good. She could keep her eyes open, even if she couldn’t get her body to do anything more than feel like dead weight.

  “How … long?” she asked.

  “Ten minutes,” Salma answered. “We’ll be there a couple minutes after, long enough for the effects to kick in.”

  Gabi nodded and immediately regretted it as the world faded out around her.

  She must have drifted off for a few minutes because the next thing she knew, the car had stopped, Gus was propping her upright against the seats and Salma was tipping liquid against her lips. She remembered enough to open her mouth, swallow the potion. Almost instantly, her head cleared, her body lifted from its weighted state, but her magic remained elusively out of reach. The price of a hasty spell, Gabi assumed. She’d pay it.

  She slid out the open door onto the roadside, and realised they were idled across the road from the second house, the engine still running. Beside them Neil’s rented car sat, empty. Fear chased off the last cobwebs of dizziness, and she charged across the road, ignoring Salma and Gus’s shouts as they started after her.

  Joy

  Something was different about these creatures. They had the same charred shells, the same paler wood visible through cracks in it, but smoke poured out, dimming the meagre moonlight filtering through the glass panes in the door and windows. Joy couldn’t see them all clearly, only the suggestion of a hoard as smoke wound through the air.

  Detached, she slid her thumb along the shaft of her wand and said, Light.

  The faux-Tiffany light came on above them, illuminating the horror of it. There had to be twenty of those creatures, all stood stiffly, waiting as the first one had waited for Joy to make the first move. But this time a female shifted as the dark air churned around her, slithering up the few steps between Joy’s coven and the ruined elves, brushing up to their skin—and recoiling. Moving around them to fill the upper floor. Joy was too numb to react to the probing smoke.

  “Witches,” spoke the blackened woman, the movement of speaking causing flakes of charred bark to peel from her cheek and float to the floor—what Joy could see of the floor, which wasn’t much, as the smoke condensed there.

  The voice, a creaking of branches, a hiss of wind among leaves, shook the last of the numbness from Joy, as if she shed the hollowness like her own bark. Fear rose up from nowhere. Her heart felt like it would explode without a moment’s warning. Her lips trembled and she couldn’t have spoken another spell or command if she wanted to. A gut feeling told her shatter wouldn’t work here, with this many. Witchcraft had limits—raw witchcraft too. But as the thing spoke again and Joy’s whole body went rigid, she decided she would try, she would stretch her power as far as it would go, even if it broke her body, severed her magic, twisted her mind. It was that or death. That or die the way her mum had.

  She lifted her blurring wand, begging her hand to steady, but Victoriya knocked her hand back down. “Look, Joy,” she hissed. “Look.”

  Joy looked, over the blackened heads of the elves with their stringy strands of hair, past their empty green eyes, their tense blackened bodies—and it was too much. There was something in the kitchen, a whirling black something with flashes of silver and gold, spinning and rotating in concentric circles, and while Joy had never seen a portal before she easily recognised one. And it was too much.

  Her mum’s murder, these new deaths, her blue power, fighting the creatures upstairs, shattering them, and coming down to find this—it was too much. The final straw. And Joy felt herself break.

  Her legs gave out but she ba
rely felt the pain as her backside hit the blunt edge of a step, as she curled around herself and sobbed. She was not herself—this was not her—but she’d been pretending she was strong and capable for so long. Not just as long as they’d been finding this killer—this cabal of elves—and not just as long as Perchta had tormented them. Joy had been pretending and holding herself together with fragile staples and Sellotape as if it could contain the force of her grief. For six years. She had never faced it, never dealt with it.

  And now it was taking her for itself, this loss, this unspeakable pain in her chest—her mum was gone. Gone. She heard a howling and distantly understood that it was herself. Heard hisses and scratching words and understood Victoriya and the creature were warring with words. Heard blunt claws scratching and howling at the door and understood Victoriya’s pack of familiars were breaking down the door. Heard impacts and barks of pain and felt flashes of witchcraft raise the hairs on her arms and understood her coven were fighting around her—

  And she sat there, curled up, falling apart, doing nothing.

  Hands locked around her wrists, pulled her to standing—cold, cold hands. Wrong hands. Her head flared with pain. Something wet and warm slid over her upper lip. Joy did not open her eyes, not even as she was dragged, her toes trailing on the carpet. What was the point? Her mum was gone—taken, killed. She was never coming back. What was the point of any of this?

  Screams and fury and horrified no’s came and went in her ears but Joy’s mind didn’t hold onto any of them. She had only enough space for the endless stretch of grief and the cold, hard hands on her.

  “Open your eyes, Bound One,” rasped the same thing that had spoken before. Joy shuddered and squeezed her eyes shut tighter. Hard, unforgiving fingers peeled her eyelids open. “He will have you see him.”

  Joy only stared. Aching. Empty but filled with pain so powerful it had destroyed her.

  “Good witch,” the charred creature praised and pushed Joy.

  Joy let the floor rise to meet her, did not care if pain shot through her—what was physical pain compared to what she was already feeling? Nothing. But she didn’t hit the floor; she hit a wall of pure energy, buzzing and humming and wrapping her in a net of power.

  Oh, Joy thought and understood. But what difference did it make if they hurt her here or somewhere else? Joy let her body go limp as the portal swallowed her.

  Pyrite

  The Crystal of Energy

  A gleaming gold stone often mistaken for real gold, Pyrite is full of assertive, masculine energy. A protective stone, Pyrite can be carried as a talisman against harm and danger, especially manipulation.

  Pride

  Inside the house was chaos, but Gabi only stumbled for a second, drawing every bit of hazy wakefulness Salma’s spell had given her. Elves—elves like the one her taser had crumpled—lined the corridor, Joy’s coven fighting among them. Gabi scanned faces for Joy, her eyes snagging on an unnatural white light coming from down the corridor. Not good, Gabi’s instincts warned. Even if her magic was unresponsive, she still had her instincts.

  But she ignored them and pushed into the fray. Gabi had lost the taser back at the other house so all she could do was raise her hands and shove blackened elves away from her, hoping they fell into the path of a spell. The hall was tight, cramped and hot. Full of that smoke. Gabi coughed again as she inhaled it, and it froze all the way down into her lungs. But she pushed her way through, ignoring the ache in her heart as she tripped over a trio of crystals on the floor that must have fallen from Joy’s pockets.

  She edged past fire—Victoria—and dogs snapping viciously alongside Maisie, and a whirlwind of air that bit at her cheeks—Eilidh—and a chilling scene of budgies and cats and dogs, all dead, some rotten and writhing with insects and decomposition, diving at corrupt elves, tearing chunks of bark—Neil. She didn’t see blue hands or Joy’s coat anywhere and her chest tightened until she struggled to breathe. She jabbed her fist into a wooden body, pushing onto an axe of flame, and shoved forward, closer to that violent white light, to the kitchen she could see now, and thought for a second she’d glimpsed a fall of pink hair.

  Her heart simultaneously leapt and fell. Joy was okay, she was moving, and Gabi could still find her, fight at her side, and make sure nothing happened to her. If these elves had come for Joy, Gabi would stop every one of them with her bare hands if she had to.

  She neared the doorway full of light, heaving for breath—not from exertion but from the black, thick smoke clogging her lungs—and noticed a block of knives on the counter just inside the room. Her attention fixed on grabbing the sharpest, pink silicone blade, Gabi didn’t see the figures barrelling towards the spinning circles of gold-dark light until it was too late, until one of them was through. Gabi’s lungs wouldn’t let a single breath in—she knew those boots, knew the body that had fallen through.

  She was going to be sick, whether because of the spell Salma had made, the smoke, or the nearness to this new, bright witchcraft. Or the brutal realisation that Joy was gone. But Gabi covered her mouth with one hand and spun the knife in the other, slicing the blade edge across the chest of the figure—the blackened elf—who had pushed Joy through the light. A small shape in the bottom of Gabi’s vision ran into the churning spell and Gabi startled. As the elf fell to the floor tiles, Gabi heaved another breath, tightened her grip on the pink kitchen knife, and jumped into the circles of light after Joy.

  Joy

  Joy stumbled through the black and gold rings of the portal, the witchcraft like silk on her skin. She almost fell but a buffer of wind kept her upright. Hollow, she stared with flat eyes at her surroundings, first saw only the man in front of her and a speckle of lights in the distance—and then the rough wind registered, along with the chattering and creaking all around and the salty smell of open water. She was on a ship.

  “About time,” the man said, his voice a gravelly whip.

  Joy flinched, but fear barely punctured that chasm inside her, that aching void of grief and loss and her mum gone. She stared at the man, his floppy dark hair and large brown eyes, his elegant tweed suit and casual stance, and did not care what this meant. What would happen. Did not care that Mrs. Nazari’s warnings about the master, the mysterious he flashed through her mind.

  “I assume my—” The man stopped abruptly and Joy stumbled again as a weight hit her from behind. “Who the hell are you?” Joy ought to have been terrified at the fury in the man’s voice.

  She turned, bending her legs to regain her balance on the rocking surface of the boat, and a pulse of shock cut through the black hole of her grief, just for a moment, when she saw Gabi, wild-eyed and pale, and Maisie at her feet. But the void rushed back in, bringing a deafening silence that drowned out even the thunder of the boat’s motor, and not even the icy rage that filled Gabi’s eyes could cut through it now.

  Behind Gabi, the golden-bright sparks of the portal sputtered, spat like drops of oil on the glossy white deck—and went out, the concentric circles of light shrinking until the portal shut with a sound that was not a sound, a hollowness that made Joy’s ears pop. They were trapped here on this boat. They were all going to die.

  “I asked a question,” the man growled.

  An arm came around Joy from behind as she faced the man—her captor—again. Gabi’s arm, she knew, but didn’t feel any more secure for it. She stared at the man, her eyes dull, stared past him and could have sworn the lights behind him were bigger, brighter—cold blue lights.

  “The better question,” Gabi said in a cold, cold voice, “is who are you?”

  “Charles Mackenzie. A pleasure to meet you, I’m sure.” Charles’s eyes were sharp with anger. “Now get off my ship.”

  “Mackenzie,” Gabi repeated. “You’re family?”

  Charles’s smile was enough to unsettle Joy; she looked away from him, watching the lights behind him get bigger—closer. Another ship. Should she have cared that they would soon be outnumbered? She thought she sho
uld have been using the wand in her hand, casting a spell using her Bound Powers. But what was the point? They were all going to die anyway—die like her mum had died.

  “You’re the one controlling the elves,” Gabi said slowly, carefully. “To get to Joy?”

  “That’s my business,” he replied, the polite veneer starting to wear off. “And my niece is my property.” It was a moment before Joy processed the increased fury of the sea, the rocking of the boat. His power—fae power, that call to water. Joy had that too, somewhere in her veins, drowning under soundless screams and loss.

  “Your property?” Gabi’s voice was calm—no, not calm. Lethal.

  The man—Charles—shook his head, lip curled back. “You wouldn’t understand. You’re not fae. But in my world, young girls are their family’s responsibility.”

  “And this has nothing to do with her having Bound Powers?”

  “This is about family. You are not family, and I would like you to leave my boat.”

  “Why?” Gabi’s arm tightened around Joy. “And why not use your magic to evict me, shove me into the water? You need the water, don’t you, for whatever spell you’re casting?”

  He scoffed.

  “There’s salt all around us—I know enough witches to recognise spell ingredients. I ruined your plans, coming here, didn’t I?”

  The lights were even closer, close enough for Joy to make out the shape of a speed boat, glossy white with a figure stood at the bow, a long coat flapping around them. Close enough for Joy to hear the engine—and for Charles to hear it too.

  Gabi pulled Joy quickly aside as Charles turned to face the sea, and a blur of moonlight on fur moved across the deck and jumped, teeth locking around Charles’s leg. Again, the surprise of it interrupted the rushing sea of grief in Joy for just a moment as a male scream of anger and pain cut the air.