She had been so beautiful. He had remembered her not as a woman or a mother, but as the embodiment of light and warmth itself. In each and every one of his memories of his mother, she was always possessed of a soft, warm glow—like an angel. With this memory unearthed now, he never thought he would be able to see her in the same light again.
“I don’t know what to do,” Isaac said. “I need guidance.”
“I cannot accompany you on this journey,” the Good Doctor said. “If you wish to become a Void Weaver, you must do this alone. You must learn so that I may teach you.”
A paradox, Isaac thought. “I… I don’t understand,” he said.
“You must, or we will not survive.”
“Wait,” Isaac said, but the Good Doctor was already fading into the shadowy corner of the room. “No! Don’t go!” Isaac dashed toward the shadows, his hand outstretched. By the time he got there, the Guardian was gone, and he was alone; alone with a corpse.
Isaac came up to the body and knelt beside her. His eyes were stinging and his throat was tight, but he took her cold, bloody hand and held it. He thought about her then, about the last year, and months of her life. Seconds he himself had been witness to. He vowed he would never forget the way her eyes, wide and fearful, had regarded him when he entered the bedroom and saw what she had done. She hadn’t expected him to see the act itself, hadn’t wanted him to, but he had come anyway, excited to tell her they had bought an entire cheesecake from the bakery for them to enjoy.
And he had forgotten. His brain had taken this traumatic memory, locked it in some deep, dark corner of his mind, and had left it there. Only the Void itself had opened that attic door, had rummaged around for this very memory, and had deliberately opened it for Isaac to look at. It was the mental equivalent to opening a box with a rotting human head inside of it, complete with the stink, and the flies, and the instinct to throw up.
Isaac put his clean hand on his mouth to stifle the moan that threatened, at any second, to spill out. Around him the world evaporated, like morning mist chased away by the sun’s touch. A cold wind pressed down on his face and shoulders, and Isaac realized as he stood that he had gone back to the dark place—to the place where his body slowly turned to mist and light.
He spun around on the spot like a dog chasing his tail, calling into the darkness, but receiving no reply. His Guardian wasn’t there, the doppelganger wasn’t there, and the world itself wasn’t there anymore. All that existed was the crushing darkness, the chilling cold, and the sense that there were things watching from the dark—hungry, inscrutable, unknowable things.
The passage of time meant nothing in this place. Hours, minutes, seconds—time itself blurred together so that it was no longer linear, one second happening before the next, but an ocean. Everything that had ever happened, was happening, and would ever happen, collided into the same moment. The only thing Isaac had to ground himself with was the slow way in which his physical, human body was turning to smoke. This was all that was real to him.
He closed his eyes hard and concentrated on making his own will manifest—to further strengthen his sense of being. But when he opened them again, an old, dusty classroom seemed to have come up out of nowhere to surround him. A spinning globe sat on the teacher’s table. Classic fictional works from the likes of Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and William Shakespeare filled the bookshelf next to the blackboard. The teacher’s desk itself was covered in papers, notebooks, pens, and even an old calculator.
This place, he thought, this was my school back in Surrey.
A cascading explosion of sound grumbled overhead, and Isaac faced the window which looked into the schoolyard. The sky was dark and the clouds were moving quickly in the same direction, like animals fleeing from a predator. Someone coughed and Isaac turned to find the classroom was full of glassy-eyed children, all wearing the same buttoned gray shirts and moss-green sweaters—the Wesley Kensington Secondary School uniforms.
Isaac’s eyebrows knitted together and he stared at the children; for a moment, he was unable to speak.
“H-hello,” he said, but the children didn’t reply.
His vision blurred momentarily and his head began to spin. He shook his head, blinked away the blurriness, and brought his mind back into focus only to find the classroom empty. His heart began to thump against his ribcage. He hadn’t heard the children get up to leave, hadn’t heard the scraping of chairs on the tiled floors, or the murmur of voices, or the rustling of bags and schoolbooks.
Again thunder broke above, causing the building’s very foundations to shake. From outside he heard a cry of elation, many children’s voices going up in alarm and surprise, some joyful, and some fearful. When he looked at the window, he noticed the schoolyard was full of children, and suddenly he was there with them. He wasn’t aware of having left the room either, but this fact seemed to be insignificant compared to what he was seeing now.
Some children were playing tag and others were playing soccer, but another small group of children seemed to be having an argument. Isaac gravitated toward them, a ghost among mortals—unseen and unheard—and recognized this for what it was. One boy, a skinny, scrawny thing, had been cornered by a taller, also skinny, boy and his friends. The smaller boy seemed to want them to leave him alone, but these things rarely worked out like that.
“Come on, then,” said the taller boy, whose pasty white cheeks were flushed red. “Give us your football cards.”
“No,” said the smaller boy.
“No? That’s not the right answer. We want your cards, and you’re going to give them to us or I’m gonna thump ya.”
“I’ll tell the teacher if you hit me.”
The taller boy leaned in close, grabbed the smaller boy by the collar of his shirt, and said “If you tell anyone, we’ll do more than just take your cards.”
The smaller boy bit his lip, which had started to quiver, and emptied his pockets of football cards. When they were neatly stacked in his hand, he offered them up to the taller boy, though the anger was clearly manifesting on his face. These weren’t tears of sadness, but tears of frustration. Football cards were cheap, but what this boy had in his hand had been the culmination of an entire term’s worth of swapping and haggling with other kids; a prized possession for an eleven-year-old boy.
The taller boy admired his newest acquisition, stuffed the stack into his pockets, and then shoved the smaller boy to the ground. “That’s for making me wait,” he said, before turning around, satisfied with himself.
At least I have a mum,” said the smaller boy.
The taller boy turned around with an angry scowl on his face. “What did you say?” he asked.
“You heard me!” said the smaller boy. He had gotten up, his face as dark as the clouds themselves.
The taller boy got two steps worth of a running start, but this was all he needed to accurately throw his foot in between the smaller boy’s legs. The small boy doubled over, screaming out in pain just as another explosion of thunder struck above them. Isaac winced at the sight of this brutal attack and almost looked away, disgusted, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. Because the taller boy, the one walking away with his friends satisfied that he had enacted his own brand of vengeance against a slight he felt had been committed against him, who was then called Thomas Moore, was in fact Isaac at age twelve.
He had forgotten all about this incident, had forgotten his rocky past at school, and the many times he had gotten into trouble and wound up at the headmaster’s office. Isaac wanted to yell at this version of himself, wanted to scream at this boy for what he had just done, but it wouldn’t have helped. No one could hear him. As the boy, his friends, and the schoolyard around them became wisps of shadow and eventually darkness, Isaac was left with the song in his head, and shame in his heart.
He had come back to the dark place, now. His hands were entirely gone. At the wrists, his arms turned to ribbons of blue mist and sparkling smoke. He started to walk in a straight
line, and the mist followed him like an obedient companion. In the back of his mind, although what was in his mind and what was real were moot points, he thought he could hear laughter… his own laughter. Only the laughter wasn’t his.
When the world, or a world, reasserted itself around Isaac, he found himself still striding hard down a cobblestone street, accompanied by a sixteen-year-old version of himself and a police constable with a tall black police hat on his head. He remembered this night well and knew immediately what was coming, but he followed anyway because being here was better than being in the dark place. Time had meaning here, it flowed forward.
It was cold out tonight, but Isaac wasn’t feeling the cold at all. He was sixteen and had just returned home after an evening out with his friends to find this very same police officer standing guard outside his front door like those who stood outside of 10 Downing Street. The officer hadn’t said a great deal except that something had happened to his father, and that Isaac had to go with him.
Isaac hadn’t been called in to identify the body they had retrieved from his house. They all knew who he had been. What they wanted was to show Isaac the note his father had left on the small table next to his favorite armchair. They had found it underneath an empty bottle of whiskey. It was a suicide note.
Sixteen-year-old Isaac didn’t read the note until the following morning. He had instead broken down that night and cried for hours. He hadn’t even registered his grandfather coming down to get him from the police station as an incident that had, in fact, occurred. To this version of Isaac, much as the Isaac who was watching, time seemed to jump from the police station to his bedroom at his grandparents’ house.
When dawn broke and the tears had stopped, despite having had no sleep, Thomas Moore read the note, which consisted only of four sentences.
“It’s your fault she’s dead,” the note had said, “Your fault my life is the way it is, and your fault I’ve decided to take it. You’re a worthless waste of space that’ll never amount to anything. I hope you’re happy with what you’ve done.”
Isaac’s chest tightened, his throat was working though he wasn’t speaking, and his mind was numb. He had remembered the night, had remembered the note itself, but had forgotten the harshness of the message. The finality and the certainty of it. It was all Isaac’s fault. Nobody else’s. Isaac had become an orphan, and it was all because he had gone with his father into town one morning and left his mother all alone in the cottage. He didn’t know she was going to take her life, but he should have.
When the world faded around him again, dissolving into darkness, more of him had turned to mist. His arms cut off at the elbows, and his feet were gone too—though he was still standing and could still, he thought, walk around and turn. He did so, testing the theory, but was unsure whether he was actually moving, or if the world around him was turning to provide the illusion of motion.
Isaac heard more laughter echoing in his mind and felt the darkness press around him further.
“Where are you!” he said into the dark, and the darkness spat his voice back in a distorted echo, over and over and over, as a church bell ringing out the hour.
No reply.
Isaac’s heart was thumping in a chest that seemed to be turning lighter by the moment. He could still feel his arms and legs, even if they were dissolving right in front of him, but eventually enough of him would disappear that—he suspected—he would not be able to feel anything at all.
At that point he would cease to be. He had to do something, and he had to do it now.
CHAPTER 17
Fight or Flight
Six Legionnaires had Alice and Cameron trapped in a sanctuary full of innocent animals. Logan had given them ten minutes to decide whether Alice was going to come out and talk, or if they were going to make the legionnaires turn the very earth upside down and ruin the sanctuary. They had spent one of those minutes assessing the situation when Cameron finally turned around to head away from the main gate.
“Cameron!” Alice said, “Where are you going?”
He stopped and turned to look at her. “We need to do something,” he said, “You heard what they said they’re going to do. You can’t be anywhere near this place when that happens.”
“You’re seriously going to put my safety ahead of the safety of these cats?”
“We don’t have time for this. Come with me.”
Cameron led Alice away from the main gate, away from the chain-link, and toward the other side of the main enclosure. Beyond the pool, almost immediately adjacent to the building they had slept in, was a wall of vines and overgrowth covered in sharp, deadly-looking thorns. It twitched as she looked at it. When she saw Cameron directing his eyes to the top of the wall and the idea came into her head that he intended for her to climb that death-trap, she stopped where she was.
“You’re insane,” she said.
“Maybe, but it’s the only other way out,” Cameron said.
“I am not climbing that thing. It looks like it’s breathing!”
“That’s because it is—and you’re not going over it, you’re going through it.”
“What?”
Cameron pressed his hand, fearlessly, against the thick roots and vines. He closed his eyes, concentrated, and then the wall began to shiver. The roots unlaced themselves like clasped hands, creating a hole large enough for a person to fit through. On the other side, Alice saw nothing but dirt, the coast, and in the distance, Ashwood.
Alice approached, wonderstruck, mouth gaping, and stared at the still twitching wall of life. “What… the fuck.”
“It’s cute you find this shocking,” Cameron said as he removed his hand from the wall.
“Cute?” she said. “This whole place is about to get hit hard by a psychopathic mage and you’re talking about cute?”
“Relax.” He reached into his jacket pocket and tossed her his bike keys. “Grab it and go.”
“You cannot be serious.”
“I’m serious, Alice. I made a promise to Isaac. A couple of promises. One of them was that I would keep you safe, the other was that I would keep you away from the magistrate. In the event that the orders should contradict, my primary goal is the second one. Isaac’s exact words.”
“Yeah, I figured that much.”
“So you have to get out of here.”
Alice took a moment to look around. From where she was, she could see the tiger, Nuala, sitting in her den with her cubs. The leopard, Kirk, was with her, as was the white tiger. They were huddled together as if they knew something bad was about to happen and were powerless to stop it. Alice understood the feeling all too well, and she wasn’t about to let them go through it alone.
“No,” she said, “There has to be another way.”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“What if I find a weapon?”
“You saw what they did to your gun. When you’re going up against a mage, if you have no magic, you’re outclassed.”
“I have magic.”
“Yeah? Where is it?”
That stung. Alice’s jaw clenched and her right hand curled into a fist, closing around the keys. “I’m not leaving you to defend this place on your own.”
“And if they take you? What then? I can’t let that happen. I won’t.”
His words may have stung a second ago, but these words made her insides float. The way he was standing—so close to her she could have touched him if she wanted to—the intensity in his misty gray eyes, and the authority in his voice… it did something to her. She was never the kind of girl to need or even want protecting, but when he suggested that this was exactly what she needed to accept, she almost believed it.
She saw a little bit of Isaac in him, now, and that worried her. In fact, he had more of Isaac in him than she had considered at first. They were both very intelligent men, both mages, both passionate about their causes—Isaac with magic and his museum, Cameron with his animals.
“Cameron,” Ali
ce said, “You can’t do this on your own.”
“I won’t be on my own,” Cameron said, “You just have to trust me.”
Alice nodded, and they started walking back to the bike. The sky rumbled and churned and the wind continued to pick up. The circular pattern that the clouds and wind seemed to be following made Alice’s heart rate elevate. We will turn this place into a ruin, Logan had said. Were they about to bring a tornado down on top of this sanctuary?
God no, please no.
“What can you do?” Alice asked, walking briskly now.
“They knew we were here because they searched for you, and they only found you because we didn’t know they were looking. Now that we know, I can stop them from using the same magic to find you again.”
“You can? Are you sure?”
Cameron nodded. “But I can only do it from here—with all six of them in front of me. And if you’re still here when I perform the spell, they’ll just be able to lock onto you again. You need to be gone.”
“Cameron…”
He turned around harshly when they got to the bike. “That’s the only play, Alice. We don’t want to have these assholes on your tail.”
“Fine, but—”
“No.” He took her hand and pulled her around the bike. “Get on.”
“You can’t make me leave, you know,” she said.
“I can, but I want you to do it yourself. This is the right thing to do, Alice. We both know it. Now please, go. We don’t have time for this. Take the bike, ride home, and I’ll meet you after. Don’t tell me where you live. I’ll find you.”
Alice stared at the bike, then back at him. She straddled it and stuffed the key in the ignition, but she didn’t turn it. Not yet. “That worries me, you know.”
“What does?”
“That you and your kind are just able to find people like that.”
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