Bound Powers

by Saruuh Kelsey

  Clarity had Joy suddenly moving, though her feet slipped on the floor, unbalanced by the thrashing waters around them. She should do something—but when she reached for the motivation, the energy to lift her arm, it was dead, lacking. Grief had returned. Joy didn’t see the point of fighting. They were all going to die anyway. She let Gabi shield her with her body, her own like lead, her eyes blurring with tears again.

  Her mum was gone—killed. A sound escaped her and she sank onto the deck on her knees, curling around herself as she had done on the stairs in the house beyond the portal. It was wet and crusted with salt under her but Joy didn’t care, only wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Joy?” Gabi asked gently—warily. Joy barely heard her over the keening issuing from her. She felt the air stir as Gabi knelt—knelt despite the man still screaming angrily with Maisie locked around his leg, despite the thumping of the second boat nearing, despite the danger all around. A ripple went through Joy, nameless but big. Gabi’s fingers were gentle as she lifted Joy’s face, her face paling as Joy met her eyes with her dull stare.

  “Joy,” Gabi breathed. “I need you to—you have to—what did they do to you?”

  Joy was aware of the silence coming from her—silence when before she had been howling. Her heart stumbled at the quick kiss Gabi pressed to her temple.

  “You have to get up. You have to, Joy. I can’t use my magic right now and you—you’re our only chance at getting off this boat. Can you do that for me? Can you stand?”

  Joy just stared. Stared and thought what is the point, until a shadow rose, blocking out a swath of stars, and Joy realised Charles was behind Gabi. Something undulated in his hand, a length of water made solid, as long and sharp as a spear as he lifted it, the movement so quick it blurred in the night and Joy just—acted.

  Red-hot rage formed in the pit of her stomach, roaring through the cracks grief had ripped open, molten in the abyss inside her chest. Forged by fury, Joy whipped her wand forward and commanded her witchcraft, her magic, her Bound Powers, to freeze. As she had that night she’d fought Perchta.

  Her temperature dropped by ten degrees.

  Charles Mackenzie—Mackenzie her slowly-recovering mind latched onto, and remembered the meaning of the words niece and property and family—froze mid-movement, the spear of water hovering by Gabi’s shoulder blade.

  “Joy?” Gabi was so quiet, so unsure.

  Joy couldn’t form words—not yet, maybe not for a long while—but she rose to her feet as Gabi carefully navigated the frozen form of Joy’s ... uncle, sliding out from under the spear’s blade-sharp tip.

  Despite the boat coming up beside them, despite the frozen captor on the deck, Gabi crushed Joy in a hug, her fingers curling into Joy’s coat, her hair, the jumper beneath. That molten core in Joy stumbled, paused, but she couldn’t let it, not yet, not while they were still on the ship and—and the portal, once onyx and golden behind them now vanished. Joy pulled away from Gabi, taking a tight breath, holding onto the anger she’d been full of when she saw the man, her uncle, about to kill Gabi. About to take her like her mum had been taken—

  No. Joy shook but she dragged her mind from that mire of grief and looked instead at Maisie, shivering and wounded, and the second boat, the man climbing over the side onto Charles boat. His head was lowered, his coat whipping around him, but the sure and confident way he moved called up a long-buried memory.

  Gabi tensed, reaching for a weapon she didn’t have, as the man easily jumped onto the deck and lifted his head to look at them. His brown hair curled slightly as it fell into his face, and wrinkles framed his eyes but the face was the same, the dark green eyes, always searching for a threat, always calculating.

  Joy took an unconscious step forward, everything in her just—still. The movement drew his attention away from the frozen man and the spear of the sea, and as their eyes met, a broken sound fell out of Joy’s voice.

  She had to be dreaming. This wasn’t real—it couldn’t be real.

  Her voice was so small as she asked, “Dad?”

  Pride

  Gabi whipped her head to Joy, then back to the newcomer. She’d never seen Joy’s dad—he’d left long before she and Joy had ever got together—but she’d heard stories of the greatest head witch Agedale had ever known. He was powerful and kind but most importantly, clever. His cleverness had kept the three communities—elven, witch, and fae—from constantly fighting. Gabi’s dad had known him, worked with him, been his friend. She remembered all the stories she used to hear about him now, as she stood facing him.

  He once walked all the way out to the sea where a line of fae ships waited, about to fire on the witch homes near the coast, because of a petty feud among two families. Todd Mackenzie had used his witchcraft to walk on water and stopped a civil war before it could begin. So Gabi did not relax her fighting stance, did not let herself calm in relief. He’d been gone a long, long time, and he was immensely powerful.

  “Joy,” he said, his eyes not moving from his daughter. Gabi wondered if he felt a similar pain to hers at the hollow eyes, the red cheeks, the strands of hair pasted to her face with tears and saltwater. Whether he did or not, Gabi saw guilt, plain and deep, in Joy’s father before his attention slid to the frozen form of Charles—his brother? “You did this?” he asked Joy, his voice unreadable. He could have been impressed, shocked, ashamed, or worried—Gabi could read none of it, and she was damn good at reading people. Wary, she was so wary of this man.

  Joy nodded, once, sharp. Gabi slid her hand into Joy’s, holding tight to her, trying to find Maisie with the corner of her eye. If this went badly and they had to fight again, she wanted to know where the fox was. For what felt like the hundredth time she wrenched a fist from that pit of magic deep inside her—and nothing answered. A flame completely guttered. Gabi had never felt this helpless, not even back in the town hall when they fought Perchta.

  “How long will it last—”

  “Convenient that you’re here,” Gabi cut him off. The helplessness was slowly turning to frustration, to chafing temper.

  Todd Mackenzie’s eyes flashed with irritation. “Before you suggest it, I am not here to help my brother drain the powers and lifeforce from my daughter. You’re lucky I managed to get here quick enough. It was very nearly not convenient.”

  “Lifeforce,” Gabi echoed, something inside her going very cold. “He doesn’t just want to kill her?” She looked at Joy, the narrowed eyes, the clenched jaw. Whatever anger she’d grasped onto, she wasn’t letting it go. Gabi didn’t blame her—her dad had been gone a long, long time, had not even come back when his wife died.

  “It’s not that easy,” Todd said. “He thinks he needs to kill her. Call off your fox.”

  Gabi blinked, realising both that Maisie didn’t trust Todd either and that she was slowly circling. “No,” Gabi replied simply. “We have no reason to trust you.”

  “Don’t be idiots,” a new voice sighed, and a lithe female form vaulted onto the deck, landing neatly beside Joy. Gabi drew her a bit closer, assessing this new threat. She was younger than Gabi, maybe fifteen. Fair haired and round-faced with a beauty mark on her cheek, but there was no innocence in her eyes, only scathing amusement. “We’re here to help. If we weren’t, you’d have been killed by now.” Even her voice was sharp and wry. She reminded Gabi of Victoriya, if Victoriya had her most venomous teeth removed.

  “I don’t know that,” Gabi reasoned, while she calculated their chances of all getting onto the now-empty second boat and escaping these two. “I don’t know you. I’m not about to trust you.”

  “Fine.” She shrugged. “But it looks like we’re your only chance of getting off this boat before that spell wears off. His hand’s dropping—did you notice?”

  Gabi hadn’t, but she saw it was true. The edge of the spear was running with water, Charles’s fingers twitching. Gabi looked to Joy—it was her choice, her decision to make. Joy met her gaze, the fire flickering slowly out. Gabi thought she
was going to dissolve into that cold, empty shell she’d been on the deck and was suddenly terrified. There had been nothing in Joy’s eyes. Nothing. It was like looking into a body without its soul. Gabi never wanted to see Joy that way again.

  “We should,” Joy began, her voice rough. “We should go with them.”

  Gabi nodded, though she didn’t like it. She jerked her chin at Maisie, who fell in beside them, and asked Todd, “What are you going to do about him?” The loathing in her voice could only suggest one person. Charles. His brother, if her assumption was right. “Leave him here?”

  Todd shook his head, brown hair falling into his eyes. “I’ll leave a binding spell on him, but it’ll only last a week. He’s—as powerful as I am. He’ll break through it. And I’m not risking any—” He cut off the words and Gabi’s mind seized onto it, recognising a secret or a weakness. “Hope, help them into the boat while I set the spell.”

  Gabi’s eyebrows flicked up but she said nothing as Joy knelt and let Maisie jump into her arms, knocking Gabi’s hand out of her own. Joy—Hope. Gabi set her palm on Joy’s back as she followed Hope across the railing to the other boat. Joy’s sister. She had to be.

  “Should I be worried about more corrupted elves finding us?” Gabi asked Hope, her voice terse. She hated this—being at someone else’s mercy, suspicious of them but forced to trust them with her life anyway. It was the first time she’d felt like this and she never wanted to again.

  Hope shrugged.

  The boat shuddered as the sea roiled in reaction to whatever spell Todd was casting on Charles and dipped again as the man jumped across the narrow slip of dark water between the two boats and went for the growling engine box at the back. In moments they were moving, Gabi’s arm tight around Joy’s waist, towards safety or into something worse.

  Joy

  Maisie pulled her lips back from her teeth as she watched Joy’s dad. Joy’s dad—who was back, here, and kept looking at her, as if Joy was the dream instead of him being the illusion. How—how?

  And that girl. She kept looking at Joy too, from the corner of her eye, glaring and assessing beneath thick eyebrows. But it was a brittle sort of anger compared to the rushing fire in Joy, the molten steel holding her broken edges together. Her father—here. Her mum—gone.

  Shaking with fury, Joy spun to look at him, this stranger that was her father, with his pale scar-flecked face and his sharp eyes. “Why didn’t you come back?” she demanded. She sounded more like herself than she had all night. Her voice did not crack. Her voice was iron.

  “It’s a long story, Joy,” he sighed, averting his eyes to look at the moonlit water around them. In the distance a larger, blacker shape rose—land—but Joy couldn’t care less.

  “It’s a long story?” Her voice twisted, metal warping. “I hope it’s a good story. It had better be a damn good fucking story.”

  “Joy,” Gabi said gently, a warning to be careful with these strangers, to not provoke them into throwing them into the sea. Screw that, Joy thought. She had her wand, gripped so hard her hand ached, and belatedly remembered her pocket full of crystals and potions. Let her father try to throw them off. She’d drag him down with her. He deserved it.

  “Joy,” her dad tried again, his eyes sliding to the girl sat behind them. “I had to leave. They would have found—”

  “I didn’t ask why you left,” she said through gritted teeth. “I asked why you didn’t come back.”

  “It wasn’t safe, for any of us.” His eyes shifted towards pleading but Joy was too furious to care.

  “It wasn’t safe?” she spat. “That’s your grand fucking reason? That’s why you didn’t bother to come back when my mum died? It wasn’t safe? Well it wasn’t safe for us—mum was killed, murdered in her bed. And you’re talking about safety?” She bared her teeth, more animal than girl, but her ire faltered at the look in her dad’s eyes, his opening and closing mouth, the hand he pressed to his chest as if to push away an ache formed there.

  “You’re lying to hurt me,” he said in a thick voice. His eyes had lost their clarity, his expression edging towards devastation. “Tell me you’re lying, Joy. She’s not—” He clenched his jaw. “Tell me you’re lying.”

  Joy still burned with anger but she couldn’t quite direct it at this man as he broke before her eyes, couldn’t find a single word to voice.

  “Dad?” It was the other girl who spoke, in a quiet voice.

  Joy just closed her eyes. Of course—of course she would have a sister. Why not, after everything else that had happened tonight? An uncle she had never met bringing her to his boat to drain her power, if she believed her absent and very suddenly present father. Her dad coming to save her when he’d been gone for fifteen and a half years. Why wouldn’t this cruel universe throw more and more at her? It didn’t want the newly forged metal to hold Joy together—some greater power wanted her broken, in pieces, irreparable.

  She sat down hard on the metal bench and Gabi’s arms were suddenly there, around her, holding tight. She did not look shocked, or afraid, only worried as she met Joy’s eyes. Joy inhaled a shuddery breath of the sea—salt and tang and citrus wind—and said, “I’m not lying. It was … it was six years ago. In her sleep.”

  “You said murdered.” Hope—Joy’s sister—edged nearer, her eyes—Joy’s eyes, her mum’s eyes—on Joy but her attention drifting to Joy’s dad. Her own dad. Gods. Joy wanted to fall asleep and wake up in a different world, wanted to reset her life to yesterday morning when her world was still unshaken, her composure still an unbroken shield.

  Joy swallowed against the lump in her throat. “She was—killed. It led us to all this…” She looked at Gabi when her own words faltered and Gabi’s arms tightened around Joy as she took over, telling them both how Joy, Maisie, and she had got here, from the first victim Gabi had found all the way to the last, here. When she finished, it was silent but for the hush of the sea, calmer than it had been all night.

  “Charles is her brother,” Joy’s dad said, breaking the quiet with a rasp. “He wanted—she never fell in line with them. That’s why she left. That, and me.” Joy watched him run a hand down his face and felt a pang in her chest. He hadn’t known; it was obvious by looking at him that he hadn’t known Joy’s mum had died. A little bit more of her anger faded.

  “We left their community,” her dad continued, “when she became pregnant with you, Joy. Charles … he’s obsessed with power, both witchcraft and command—control. Ch—she never listened to him, never did as she was told, but he didn’t truly hate her until she left.” It was painful to hear him stumble over her mum’s name. “She defied him in a way no one ever had before, and worse, she’d defied him by running off with a witch and an unborn child, both of fae and witch heritage.” He lifted bleak eyes to Joy. “You have Bound Powers—witchcraft and magic bound together in you. There’s … a seer made a prophecy thirty years ago about a girl with Bound Powers. That girl is powerful enough to rupture the doors between life and afterlife. That’s why Charles is so obsessed with the old stories, why he’s hunted you and killed—”

  Joy swallowed, her stomach turning even as Gabi held her even tighter, as if she could protect Joy by sheer will alone. “It’s not … it’s not me. Is it?” Joy asked quietly. She’d been left behind in Agedale with her mum while her dad had fled—with Hope.

  “No,” her dad confirmed softly. “I’m sorry, Joy. I never wanted to leave, you have to know I’d never leave you behind, not if I had a choice.”

  “But you did,” Joy said, feeling empty again—but not sinking into that void just yet. “You did leave me behind, and you chose to leave me.” She dropped her eyes, her gaze meeting Maisie’s who had stopped snarling and now just looked sad.

  “I’m so—”

  “Dad,” Hope interrupted. “Leave it.”

  Joy didn’t look up to see her dad’s expression, to read what the stretch of silence meant before he said, still in that choked voice, “We’re coming in to land.”<
br />
  “Where are we?” Gabi asked. The words rumbled through her chest into Joy’s body; for some reason she couldn’t explain, Joy clutched her tighter. She had come so close to dying but that wasn’t it. She was still … Joy was still scared. To lose her. Of this whole situation. To look at the phone turned off in her pocket. But it was something deeper than that. She didn’t want to let go.

  “The north coast of Wales,” Joy’s dad answered.

  “Wales?” Shock coloured Gabi’s voice. “But we came through that portal in Glasgow.”

  “The tip of the triangle,” he sighed. “I know what Charles was trying to do. What he’ll try to do again as soon as that binding spell breaks, if that hasn’t severed his controlling spell over the elves, which is possible. Where you were in the water, I’d make an educated guess that was the midpoint of the triangle, a place to harness the energy from all those connected deaths.”

  The coven had said something similar but hearing it confirmed made Joy sick. All these people killed—her mum murdered—for a spell. A fucking spell. Joy must have been gripping Gabi tight—too tight—because Gabi turned her head to kiss Joy’s cheek, her eyes steady, studiously calm. “We’ll be okay,” she whispered.

  Joy looked at the wand still clutched in her hand, between her cold fingers and where they were snarled around Gabi’s coat. If she had to, could she use it, to protect herself and Maisie and Gabi? Protect herself from her own family?

  “You said he’d try again,” Gabi said slowly, not to Joy but her dad as the motor powered down and Hope jumped onto a jetty to secure the boat. “He’ll kill more people? Create the triangle again?”

  “No,” Todd said, stepping onto the jetty and holding out a hand to help them across as Joy stood, Gabi’s arm securely around her. “Not the triangle.”