Misfit Witchcraft (Misfits Book 2)

by Niall Teasdale

  On the other hand, the weird thing was that, as she pieced together the shape of the spell Nadira Armonia described, the one she called the ‘Harmony Transformation,’ it made some sense. Partially it was what Krystal had managed to get from the text she had read in the treatise, but there were bits and pieces from Thoughts on the Nature of Magic which seemed to fit with the new spell. There was something there, right on the edge of Krystal’s understanding, and she was almost certain that the spell could be worked…

  The sudden sense of alarm was stronger this time. Krystal could become fairly oblivious to the world around her when she was focused on a book, but the feeling of urgency from the wards around the city broke her out of her reverie with a gasp.

  ‘Krystal?’ Trudy asked, looking up from packing her bag.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Krystal said, getting to her feet. ‘Something… something’s trying to get in.’

  ‘Spiders?’ Felicia asked in something of a squeak.

  ‘I don’t… No. Something a lot bigger than spiders.’

  ‘It’s a dragon,’ Cadenza said as she walked in. She was walking fast, but just walking: calm and urgent all at once. ‘A true dragon. He’s circling over the city, looking for a way in, I think.’

  ‘Shastin Nightsky?’ Krystal asked.

  ‘That I don’t know, but it’s a big one. A fully mature true dragon. I want you all to get your things together and get out of here. Go past my room. The passage will take you out to the edge of the city. Stay low and you’ll–’

  ‘No!’ Krystal exclaimed. ‘I am not running away while you go fight something that powerful. I haven’t even had a chance to figure out whether I like you as a mother and you’re going to get yourself killed? No!’

  ‘Krystal–’ Cadenza bit off whatever she was going to say, her brows knitting. ‘I gave you up once to keep you safe. I can’t do less now. Run. Just… run.’ Then she turned and headed for the door, turning right as she exited to head for the centre of the city.

  ‘Well, that’s a stupid plan,’ Ramona said. ‘Does she think this guy won’t come after us when he’s finished with her? He’s obviously given up on being secret about this. It’ll be seven girls against a true dragon. We wouldn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘Yes,’ Felicia said, ‘but what can we possibly do to help her?’

  Krystal slammed her palm down on the open book beside her. ‘We can do this.’

  ‘The harmony thing?’ Charlotte asked. ‘How is that even going to help?’

  ‘If we’re all willing to be part of it, it’ll bring all our power together as a unit. We’ll be stronger together than any dragon on the planet, even a thousand-plus-year-old true dragon. I… I don’t know exactly what it’ll do to us, but Cadenza’s right, we’re perfect for this. Seven friends, each a different colour.’ Rainbow sparkles were already dancing around her as she transformed. ‘If we do this, together, I don’t believe there’s anything that could stand against us.’

  ‘But you’re not sure what will happen to us?’ Felicia asked.

  ‘No, but Cadenza said it… My mother said it. She gave me up once to keep me safe. I’m not willing to let her give herself up to protect me a second time. If you guys aren’t in, I’m going out there to help her on my own.’

  ‘You know I’m in,’ Trudy said.

  ‘And we aren’t going to get away, even if we do run,’ Ramona said. ‘If I can help, I will.’

  ‘Self-preservation is always a strong motive,’ Felicia agreed. ‘And I have a certain sympathy for someone who has suddenly found her mother again. I’m in.’

  There was the distant sound of falling masonry. Above them, battle had been joined.

  ‘Let’s get on with this,’ Xanthe said. ‘Only the ancestors know what’s going on out there.’

  ‘All right,’ Krystal said, ‘everyone gather around me and, um, think harmonious thoughts.’

  ~~~

  Cadenza stepped up onto the open top of the broken tower and looked around for the dragon. From a few steps below, Opal let out a meow. ‘Use your words, cat,’ Cadenza suggested. ‘And stay down there.’

  ‘This is foolishness.’ The words were soft, feminine, a little on the regal side, and inside Cadenza’s head. A familiar could not talk, unless it happened to come from a species which could, but there was a mental link between owner and creature which obviated the need. A familiar could speak into its mistress’s head across almost any distance. It was just a shame it did not work both ways.

  ‘He attacks on my home ground,’ Cadenza replied, though she was not so certain just now. Above them, the sky had darkened. Black clouds swirled rapidly in the air currents, but the hulking, black form of the true dragon which was flying above her was not bothered by the winds. Somehow, this one had managed to funnel the effects of the warding spells aside. The spells of protection anyway; the alarm spells had been left in place, so he had wanted her to know that he was here.

  ‘He’s setting a trap, Cadenza,’ Opal said.

  ‘I’m sure he is. Just stay out of his sight. If he attacks you, that is not going to help me at all.’

  ‘Very well.’ There was a definite mental sigh in with the words, but Opal vanished further down the staircase, out of sight, and Cadenza turned her attention back to the sky.

  The dragon was turning, wheeling about. He was a big one, easily fully mature and twenty feet from nose to tail. His wings flapped lazily as he came about: no dragon really flew by natural means and the reason for the wings on true dragons was unknown. He was black. Not the iridescent black of Nightshade’s feathers, but a dull, stony black which seemed to soak up the light. All except for the horns at his neck, another marker of age and masculinity, which were grey.

  He opened his mouth and roared, and Cadenza saw something bright and flickering along the maw of sharp teeth. She moved, ducking back down the steps of the tower. Light flared above her and there was the sound of thunder as the dragon unleashed whatever lightning spell it had been holding ready. There was a crash from above as the bolt shattered part of the tower wall.

  ‘Break my home, will you?’ Cadenza muttered. She stepped back up in time to see the dragon turning away, readying himself for another attack. She lifted her hand with the ball of orange shimmering energy she had been readying in her palm and tossed it out toward the retreating dragon. The orange orb caught the dragon’s right rear foot and blossomed into flame, and the creature let out a roar of pain before turning sharply in the air and letting out another blast of lightning. Cadenza saw it coming and shifted aside even as the hair was rising on the back of her neck. The bolt missed her but exploded against the stone behind her, and she was buffeted against the remains of the wall by the shock of it.

  Shaking her head, she looked up to see the dragon closing on her. She had seconds before the thing’s jaws would be closing on her head.

  ~~~

  Krystal worked carefully through the directions her great-grandmother had transcribed into the book. There were components she did not understand, elements and symbology she felt sure belonged to no corpus she had ever encountered. Somehow, Nadira Armonia and her family had learned magic no one else knew, but understanding was not required to make the spell work. If Krystal followed the directions for the shaping carefully enough, performed the spell exactly as described, it would work.

  Around her, her friends were all in scales now. It had seemed right: one of each colour, so why not demonstrate that they were one of each colour. There was nervousness there: no one knew exactly what was about to happen. They were going to, somehow, be connected together, but no one knew how. They were going to fight a true dragon magus, probably a very old one with a lot of power, and no one knew how that would work out. But there was also determination. Here stood seven friends, determined to stop one of theirs losing something very precious.

  As Krystal shaped the spell, a swirl of light appeared around them. A rainbow ribbon circled out from Krystal and began to twine around each girl and it
was soon joined by other, meteor-like streamers of red, gold, indigo… The bands merged as the silver streamer representing Trudy joined them. White light burned in a circle which expanded into a sphere.

  ‘Oh,’ Felicia said, her voice sounding distant. ‘I feel a little… strange.’

  And then the entire room filled with blazing, white light.

  ~~~

  Cadenza had been ready for the claws. The claws had swept over her head as she ducked. The tail… The tail had been another matter. The pain was considerable and she was having trouble breathing; she had managed to hold onto the spell she was shaping, but whether she could stay awake to cast it was another matter. She could hear Opal yowling from below her and she knew the dragon was swinging back to finish her. She had to keep trying.

  Then, as her vision narrowed and she knew she was not going to make it through the spell, she felt something. On the edge of her dimming consciousness, Cadenza felt something happening far below her. It was like no other magic she had ever felt, but it was there, happening.

  ‘She can’t have…’ Cadenza whispered to no one, and then her world went entirely dark.

  ~~~

  There was light and colour. For a second or two, Krystal stood in her mother’s lounge-cum-laboratory as the world refocused itself around her and, she thought, nothing seemed to have changed.

  ‘But it has.’

  ‘Where is everyone.’

  ‘Did it work.’

  ‘I feel different…’

  ‘…but the same.’

  The jumble of voices came all at once and none of them were Krystal’s voice, but they all seemed to be within her. ‘I think it worked,’ she said. ‘I think it worked and we’re all… me.’

  ‘Oh, perfect,’ Felicia’s voice said. ‘I’ve always wanted rainbow scales.’

  Krystal raised her hand to look at it, and realised that there was nothing there. There was light, white light with flashes of colour marbling it. She had no arm. ‘Well, sorry, I don’t think we’re me as in my body. I think we’re… something else, but I think I’m driving.’

  ‘Well then,’ Charlotte’s voice said, ‘why don’t you drive us out of here so we can go help Cadenza.’

  Krystal looked at the door. ‘Excellent suggestion,’ she said, ‘but how do–’ She was moving as soon as she had the intention to, flying out into the corridor, turning and racing forward, up, past the tanglecat crying on the stone steps of the tower and up into the sky.

  ‘There!’

  ‘Cadenza.’

  ‘She’s hurt.’

  ‘Unconscious.’

  ‘We have other worries,’ Krystal said, though she was beginning to have a little difficulty working out if it was her speaking.

  The dragon was closing on Krystal, fast. Or closing on all of them. Or… Whatever, it was moving too quickly for a magical attack. From the looks of Cadenza, the dragon had used some sort of physical attack on her and it seemed to be trying the same thing on… whatever the misfits had become.

  ‘Huh, that has new meaning.’

  ‘Yeah, we really are misfits now.’

  ‘Or just the one misfit with seven voices.’

  Claws flashed at Krystal’s face, or seemed to be coming at her face, and she shifted aside, only to have the dragon’s tail sweep in as it passed. Krystal gasped, but the thick tail, built to club opponents into submission, passed through her as though she was made of smoke. Still, it felt as though she was bruised and a few of those blows might cause problems. Krystal looked out into the distance and began accelerating away.

  ‘He’ll come after us.’

  ‘The way we’re accelerating, we’re faster than he is.’

  ‘Is he really Shastin Nightsky?’

  ‘Should we just run for it?’

  ‘And leave Cadenza back there?’

  ‘We’re going back,’ Krystal said. ‘I want to put some distance between us and the dragon. Then we’ll see who he is.’ Krystal flew out in a straight line for five or so seconds and then turned, circling around the city and the true dragon trying to close the distance. It had little chance: whatever they were, it was faster.

  ‘I’d say we’re as fast as I am, more or less.’ Charlotte’s voice for sure that time.

  Lightning flared out from the true dragon, missing by a few feet. ‘Good thing,’ Krystal said, ‘since he’s tossing lightning bolts around.’ She let go of the spell she had been shaping as she arced into a banking turn. ‘Yes. That’s Shastin Nightsky, but…’

  ‘So it is him!’

  ‘How? He’d have to be–’

  ‘Older than any dragon–’

  ‘I’ve ever heard of.’

  ‘There’s something weird about him,’ Krystal said. ‘It’s him, but it’s like he’s not really there. Whatever that is out there, it has no spirit.’

  ‘That’s crazy. How–’

  ‘You can’t be alive if you’ve no–’

  ‘Is he undead?’

  ‘He’s alive,’ Krystal said, ‘but he’s not alive in that body. Right. Let’s finish this.’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Get him!’

  Krystal began shaping a spell as she began to close the distance with Shastin Nightsky. There was every probability that he was preparing another lightning strike, but Krystal could feel the power at her command, the immense power of the Harmony Configuration, her great-grandmother’s concept made actual. She rushed the spell and drove toward Shastin Nightsky. His jaws opened, electricity flaring around his fangs, building to the point where he would unleash it, and the way Krystal was moving, he would have a point-blank shot.

  Except that she was closing too fast, and her spell was ready first. The dark clouds above them opened with a shudder. It was almost sunset and there should have been little light coming down from above, but light there was, brilliant and white, burning the clouds away before it shot down to engulf the dragon. There was a roar of pain and, when the beam of light faded, there was a burned circle in the undergrowth below the falling body of the dragon, twisting and turning, end-over-end, as it dropped.

  ‘Got him!’

  ‘Check him.’

  There was little doubt in Krystal’s mind as she watched the dragon crash into the burned forest floor that whatever life had been in it was gone, but she summoned up the power for a spell anyway. ‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘If he was ever alive at all, he’s not now, but…’ She shook her head, though, when she thought about it, she was not entirely sure she had a head to shake. ‘Let’s see whether Cadenza is better off.’

  ~~~

  Cadenza Armonia opened her eyes and groaned. Surprisingly, the pain was gone. It seemed as though someone had healed her wounds, though it also seemed unlikely that the dragon she had been fighting would do that, and then there was the fact that Opal was beside her, eyes fixed on something… Cadenza turned her head to look at whatever it was and gasped.

  In front of her, hovering just above the now further damaged top level of the tower, was a ball of light perhaps nine feet across. The thing seemed to be shifting as she looked at it, a turmoil of white flecked with reds, yellows, blues… All the colours of the rainbow danced across the glowing surface.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Krystal’s voice, but also not Krystal’s voice. It came from the glowing ball, but it seemed to echo out of the air.

  ‘Better than I was.’ Cadenza got to her feet. Now she thought about it, Opal did not seem to be distressed, just… interested. ‘You got the spell to work. The Harmony Transformation.’

  ‘Yes,’ Krystal’s voice said. ‘It was Shastin Nightsky.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He’s gone. The body’s down on the ground.’

  Cadenza rushed to the wall and looked down. There was a burned circle of bushes among the ruins and, just off-centre, a body. The dragon had returned to the shape of a man upon death, but it was a burned corpse which lay there in the blackened circle. ‘No!’ Cadenza turned and found hersel
f looking at seven girls who were blinking as they tried to get their brains back together. ‘Nadira said that killing while in the Harmony Configuration was bad. She–’

  ‘Was wrong,’ Krystal said. She squeezed the bridge of her nose, shook her head, and then looked up at her mother again. ‘Not entirely right anyway. I need to read the whole of that book, but it doesn’t matter anyway. Shastin Nightsky isn’t dead.’

  ‘But–’ Cadenza cut herself off and took a deep breath. ‘I think I could do with a drink, and with him out of the picture for a while at least, I guess you can stay another night, if you wish.’

  Krystal glanced around at her friends and then nodded. ‘I… wasn’t exactly happy about having to leave so quickly as it was.’

  ‘Good,’ Cadenza said, smiling even if the smile looked a little forced. ‘No one has, to my knowledge, ever successfully cast the Harmony Transformation. I want to hear all about it.’

  ~~~

  ‘It was weird,’ Ramona said. ‘I felt like I was there, but I couldn’t do anything, except that I was doing things.’

  ‘Yes,’ Felicia agreed, ‘the same here, but it was the power that got me. I felt like I could do anything. But then I couldn’t do it, it was down to Krystal.’

  ‘But I was Krystal,’ Trudy added. ‘Well, not exactly, but it sort of felt like that. I could hear everyone talking, in my head, but also not in my head.’

  ‘It sounds confusing,’ Cadenza said.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Jesse said. ‘I mean, now that we aren’t in it, it sounds confusing, and I’m a little confused, but at the time it was… beautiful.’

  ‘Harmonious,’ Ramona said.

  Krystal nodded. ‘It was confusing, in a way. I don’t think I really tapped into the full power of the thing because… Well, I just had immediate concerns to deal with. I was me, but not. We were physically there, all of us, but we were kind of, um, diffuse. Shastin Nightsky’s tail went through us and barely touched us.’

  ‘I feel a little bruised,’ Charlotte said.

  ‘Yeah, but it would’ve flattened us normally.’

  ‘It certainly flattened me,’ Cadenza said.

  ‘Exactly. There was power there. I mean, I pulled that light spell together in half the time it should’ve taken without any trouble. But there’s a purpose behind the power. Nadira was right about the killing thing, sort of. I knew it would be all right to hit Shastin Nightsky with everything we had, but even if he had been alive, I could have killed him to save someone else. I think… I think that the Harmony Configuration is designed to make more harmony, or to eliminate chaos and disharmony.’