Now’s not the time to tell her. Besides, what if it’s not the mark? It could be the stress of everything. If I tell her then I’ll be making it worse, especially when it turns out to be nothing. “I’ll see you later.”
As I get in my car, I have the realization that this is one more thing I have in common with my dad. We’ll both keep the truth a secret if it means saving someone we love.
…
Classes for the Statics started three days ago. Today’s the first day we’ve had double digit attendance: Twelve. It doesn’t seem like many in the scheme of things, but it is. At least they’re coming.
“Let’s start with the control formulas,” I say. If they can’t control their magic, then they can’t do anything.
The class jumps into action, spreading out across the training room. Four newbies partner up with some of the Statics from the first classes. The first day is the hardest. The void, even when it’s tainted like this is, doesn’t work like the essence. Somehow this magic is in between. The essence creates by pulling from the elements, and the void from nothing. This is more essence, but also tainted by thoughts. It would all be so much easier if Pen could be here.
I watch as one kid in the class, Ash, starts a simulation demon attack with a newbie. She moves quicker than most Enforcers I’ve seen. Her magic is strong, and she’s learned control quickly. The whole simulation is over in less than a minute, and the newbies’ eyes are huge.
“Good job, Ash,” I yell out. She gives me a thumbs up.
Around the room, this is the standard. Simulations and training, using techniques to move items and learn basic control. I stop in the back corner and watch a boy named JC. He’s young, maybe thirteen, and the only one in his family that hasn’t had magic. Until now. He’s been here every day.
JC turns on the simulation and dives around a demon, under another’s legs and is on his feet in seconds. He slides across the floor, grabbing a salt gun from the rack on the wall. The two demons lunge toward him, but he calls out a spell and sends one into the wall. The other uses magic on him and knocks the gun from his hand. The demon snarls, and moves across the room in a second. JC is ready, and uses magic to hang him from the ceiling. In a swift movement, he tosses salt and yells the incantation, and simulation demon explodes. Demon two sneaks around the back of the room behind his back, but JC calls up the gun with the magic and pulls the trigger as soon as it hits his palm. No more demons.
Everyone cheers as he finishes and he stands there with a big smile. The others slap him on the back and then go back to their other places. As I turn away, I notice the look on his face change and it makes me pause. He stumbles forward.
“JC?”
He looks over at me, eyes wide and face pale. Shit. “JC!”
Wordlessly, he caves to his knees and falls over. I race over to him, but he’s already sprawled out on the ground. I know before I touch him that he’s already dead.
…
My dad’s quiet. I sit across from him in his office, but neither of us speak. It’s a rare thing to see him worried. I can’t say that I’ve seen it much before in my life. He buries his head in his hands, not making a noise, and I sit there, staring, not sure what to say. While I’m still processing his reaction, he pops his head up, clears his throat, straightens out his jacket, and looks at me. Moment’s over, I guess.
There’s a knock on the door before Sabrina and Rafe come in without waiting for a response.
“JC’s parents have taken him home. They are such faithful servants, it’s a shame this happened,” Rafe says.
Sabrina looks at him. “Perhaps we were wrong to encourage the use of magic in this way.”
“It’s not wrong. They’re learning. It’s been three days.” I say. I can’t believe her sometimes.
She puts her hands on her hips. “Three days and how many have come? This isn’t solving the problem.”
I stand and the chair scratches the floor. “You haven’t even given it a chance.”
“How many have died during your ‘chance’?” Sabrina says cooly, even though she’s only inches from my face. It’s been three days. They can’t expect it to work out overnight.
“Sixty,” Dad says, and all three of us look at him. “Sixty Statics have died in five days.”
“And how many more must die before we take action?” Sabrina asks, turning away from me to my dad. This is bullshit. He can’t be listening to this. Dad’s eyes look between us before he stands.
“What action would you like to take?”
“What?” I shout. This is wrong.
Rafe holds out his hands in front of him. “Whatever the cause, it’s obvious that the magic is behind it. It’s the magic we must control.”
“The solution is to get rid of the magic,” Sabrina says. She means the mark, even if she doesn’t say it, back to the original plan. “It will prevent any further deaths and any further disruptions.”
Rafe, Sabrina, and Dad all share a glance. Dad sighs, his whole body moving, and strokes a hand over his bushy beard. He can’t be considering this.
“I’ve researched the mark. It made all the witches who had it crazy. You’re asking for trouble if you pass it around to everyone. You have no idea what the response will be. This isn’t normal magic, you’ve said it yourself,” I say.
“You researched it?” Dad asks.
“You gave it to Penelope,” as if that’s all the explanation he needs. That’s not the point of this conversation at all. “Besides, you’ll never have enough time or magic to mark all the Statics.”
Sabrina crosses her arms. “I’ve already trained the reserves. I did it in case your plan failed, which it has. Victor, I know he’s your son, but think about the good of everyone. Our world is in danger.”
I shoot her a glance. She’s trained them on giving the mark? Dad looks as surprised as I am. She can’t go behind his back like that, can she?
“How many are trained?” he asks.
“Father.”
“Forty Enforcers,” Sabrina says, barely containing her smile.
I lean into my dad, hands pressed on the desk. “Don’t do this. It could kill them,” I say.
“They’ll die anyway,” Sabrina says.
The room is quiet. Rafe doesn’t say anything. Dad rests two fingers on his temple, thinking. What’s there to think about? This is dangerous.
Dad straightens his posture. “Gather them, and split the city up into sections. We’ll start tonight.”
I can’t believe him. All of them. I leave the room and let the door slam behind me.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Penelope
I’m in my car when a buzzing sound goes off. But it’s not my phone. I tinker around until I find the large, round, gray communicator—relay—buzzing under the passenger seat. I’d forgotten about that thing. I stare it at it, at the small red blinking button. Did it blink before? I press my finger against the red button, and then the car spins. Literally spins. Or maybe I’m spinning. Then I’m not in the car—I’m on the library floor.
Whoa.
Seak rubs his face against my arm. I’m in the library. How am I in the library?
“What the heck was that?” I ask.
“Relay,” Poncho says. I look up from the floor toward his rounded face. He holds a hand out. “Hello, Miss Grey.”
I take his hand and he guides me up. “You didn’t tell me it did that.”
“Didn’t I?” he says, and then he shrugs. “It does a multitude of things.”
I stare at the plastic thing and then slide it into my pocket. Half of it sticks it out.
“I’ve been calling you all morning,” Poncho says. I follow him through the library back to the information desk.
“What’s so important?”
He stops and turns to face me. “I have found the cause of your sister’s condition.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. “You have? Who asked you to look?”
“Mr. Prescott,” he say
s.
A sinking feeling falls into the pit of my stomach. If he’s looking into what happened to Connie, how long will it be until he discovers I’m what happened? And if he learns that, then what if he learns that I took the deal with Lia? The nervousness sets my magic on alert, like an arrow taut on a bowstring. “What did you find?”
Poncho leans into me. “Traces of the void.” He pauses. “The void is a powerful magic, much different than the essence. It exists without rather than within. A pure magic that can kill.”
“Kill?”
He nods. “Witches can’t handle such pure magic. The void is a seeping poison to the heart. The contact slowly shuts down the body over days. Most victims don’t survive long.”
Don’t survive… “How long?”
“The longest case was twenty days, but that witch was a halfling. Halflings are still susceptible to the magic. The void and the essence will always battle, since only one can have control. The battle between the two magics is what kills someone.”
This is pretty much what Lia told me. Connie’s been in a coma for eight days. I freeze, eyes on Poncho. I’ve never told him directly what I am, but I always assumed he knew. I can’t tell from his face whether he’s testing me.
“Why are you telling me all this?” I cross my arms, hoping it shows more of whatever point I’m trying to make. I’m not even sure right now. The void stirs within me.
His eyes are on me, and I feel like he’s looking through me. “Perhaps it is a demon seeking to finish what Kriegen started.”
Kriegen. She wanted to convert me and Carter. “Kriegen’s dead.”
“Indeed,” he says, voice very still. “I will continue to look into it, per Mr. Prescott’s request. I do suggest that you keep that dagger hidden. If a demon is after you and your sister, it could be for that, since it too links back to Kriegen.”
He’s not completely wrong. Lia needs the dagger, but she needs me, too. “I will,” I say. My eyes drift to the clock. I’m late for Lia. Poncho stares at me. “Anything else?”
“You should continue with your day. You don’t want to be late for your plans.” I freeze. How does he know I have plans? I start to question him, but he holds up a hand. “You looked at the clock, Miss Grey.”
Right. I glance at it again, directly above his head. He never misses anything. “See you later.”
“I am here should you need me as you are aware that I am here to guide you.”
“Your destiny,” I say. “I almost forgot.”
“Yes, and yours. For it is underway.”
I swallow, nervous and on edge suddenly.
Poncho only smiles. “Have a good day, Miss Grey.”
…
Lia is waiting in the woods off the trails in the same place where I first saw Kriegen use the dagger. It’s a good location, secluded, with open space and not many eyes. At first, I could still see the red-headed witch that died and the dagger releasing her essence into the atmosphere. Now, after four days of meeting with Lia, it seems like a distant memory. It’s not lost on me that this is where everything changed, and now, it’s where I’m changing.
“You’re late,” Lia says. Her voice comes from above me and when I find her, she’s sitting up in a tree. I think about giving her a reason, but I don’t think she needs one. She’s not my keeper. Lia jumps down from the tree and lands on her feet.
“Let’s not waste time talking,” she says. We walk to the center of the open space and she faces me. “Start where we left off yesterday. Remember what you did?”
I nod and exhale.
We started out with small things. I demonstrated how I’d been using the void by calling up images in my head and then projecting them out. She told me that was incomplete and weak. I’d always thought the void created from nothing, and it is, but it creates from what I visualize—from conception, to use, to ending. Apparently, there’s a way to use the void without thinking, to have it become part of me and respond. When that happens it—and I—can do way more damage.
Lia said the reason my using the void backfired on Connie was because I didn’t have a clear image of how to stop what happening, and I didn’t have control of my emotions. When I’m too emotional, the void doesn’t know how to respond so it either doesn’t, or it goes too crazy to control. She says it’s better to feel nothing. With Connie, I was scared, and fear is the most powerful of all emotions. The result of that fear is lying in a coma in a hospital bed.
Lia walks around me in a circle. “I want you to call on the void again, and then close it off immediately. Emotions are a liability, but being able to control them makes you powerful. Our goal here is to make the void be completely connected to you.”
Apparently, phenomenal cosmic power requires you to not feel anything. That completely goes against how we’re taught to use the essence. The essence is heightened by emotion, the void hindered by it.
“Feel the strongest emotions,” she says. Fear, anger, worry, the emotions that command decisions. “Then cut it off, let the void take over.”
I nod and focus on the empty space around me. I see an image of a tree falling down, what I want to happen immediately, but no. Not allowed. No images.
Fear. I have a lot of options, and they all flood through me. I need to pick one moment, so I focus in on when I was a child. Each time I go there, though, back to that moment, I feel myself crack open. Yet I keep going back. For the last four days, I keep going back.
Mommy is singing to me and daddy busts in, and lunges at us. Mommy throws me under the bed and starts fighting him. I’m so scared. I can’t see anything, but I can hear it all. I can hear her. What is daddy doing? Why is he being mean? I don’t want to hear so I cover my ears and mommy screams. A demon grabs at my feet, pulls me from my spot under the bed. I’m crying, screaming for mommy, for daddy, but the demon holds me down. I can’t get away. I can’t get away. Mommy whispers magic words, says my name, says please to the demon. But the demon with the orange eyes laughs at me. “Watch this,” he says to me while his friend tears into mommy’s throat.
I feel the magic building up, that familiar bursting sensation right before it flows from my pores. It wants to come out, but I’m still in my house, still a kid, still afraid.
“Now close off your emotions. Don’t feel anything, Penelope. Let go.”
That’s easier said than done.
Don’t feel anything.
Be a wall. Be a statue. Be solid and unmoving. Close the door. Love no one. Fear nothing. Be nothing.
I force the images of the demons and mom and me away from my head. I try not to see the blood. I tell child-memory me to take a breath, to forget, to release it. I push all of those emotions back down into the box I’ve built in my head. I push and push and try to not feel. To not care.
I won’t care. I don’t. Nothing can harm me.
Then the magic pours out of me in the form of light and wind. Not with the usual force that it carries, but more obedient. I try not to enjoy it. But when I see Lia smile, I break my concentration and the magic stops.
“Good job,” Lia says. “But you need to be faster at gaining control of the emotions and turning them off. When you do that, you’ll be unstoppable. Again.”
That’s what we do over and over. She makes me feel a strong emotion, then makes me close it off. For hours we do this, and when she’s satisfied, she allows me to stop.
“Better, but it still takes you too long.”
“Sorry, I’m not a robot.” It’s hard to shut off that pain. To not feel it. She’s asking me to harness it into the magic, and that’s not done overnight. Not when I’ve had so much of it.
Lia shakes her head “It’s not about being a robot, it’s about not having connections. Your emotions are still attached to these people. Demons don’t develop feelings. It’s the human emotions that make you weaker.”
“Demons have no feelings?”
“None,” she says. “We have to kill to survive, to continue our population. If w
e had feelings, then we couldn’t do that. The conscience is a tool of destruction. When a demon is made, the old life is gone—for a Non or a witch. The ties that bind them to this world are removed.”
“Then why do you want to be a human again?”
“Because I remember what it was like,” she says. “The sun on your skin, a first kiss, the way food tastes. I always try to keep it close, and other demons don’t. Remembering makes it hard to be powerful. I don’t remember my life, particularly, but I can almost remember how it was to be alive. I hang out at this bar called O’Malley’s sometimes because being around the living is as close as any of us demons can come to being alive.”
“You’re alive now.”
“Am I?”
I stare at Lia. Her appearance will never allow her to be human again, to live the life she once did. I stand and dust off my pants. That’s when I notice the blackness has spread up my hand and over my wrist.
“It’s spreading,” I say. She takes my hand and examines it.
“You need to master the magic. You have to accept it.”
“I’m trying.”
“You need to be faster. Three hours a day isn’t enough.”
I look at the blackness spreading up my hands. “Everyone is going to see this.”
Lia takes my hand and runs a finger over the vein. “We can glamour it. We’ll have to do it every day, and more frequently as it expands. I’ll show you,” she says.
She calls on the void and I feel it embrace the space around me. She doesn’t say anything, and it’s only a second, and then my marks are not visible. Not even to me.
“How do you do that?”
“The same way you will. Devotion to practice,” she says, crisply pronouncing every syllable.
I sigh. “Then let’s do it again.”
…
It’s nearly three a.m. when I sneak into the house. The stairs creak as I walk up them, and I try to be quiet. My hands are shaky from doing magic all day, and the last thing I need is Gran on my case asking questions about where I was all night. I doubt she’d like my answer of hanging out with a new demon friend who’s teaching me how to use demon magic.
Storm: a Salt novel (Entangled Teen) Page 16
