by Annie Bellet
Sand. I pictured the weight on me being ground to dust and sent power flowing into the rocks. The darkness around me started to hum. My body began to wake up to more than just pressure. Pain like a thousand needles danced along my skin. I clung to the single image of stone into sand and sand into a river flowing off me. I wasn’t here, being crushed alive over and over by thousands of pounds of rock and dirt. I was safe in my mental circle, deep within my magic where no pain could reach me.
There is no pain, I kept telling myself. Only the river. Only the power.
Air, fresh and wonderful and cool on my stinging, scraped skin. I gave a final shove with my magic, blowing the sand away from me, clearing my body of grit and weight until I was blissfully unfettered.
For a long moment I lay, gasping in beautiful air, my lungs expanding a ribcage that was trying to tell me it had seen better days. Things were probably broken but I had toes again. I wiggled them and regretted it as leg muscles protested their existence.
Sorcerer. Danger. I made myself find my hands and scrape sand from my eyes.
Then Alek’s arms were around me. I heard voices but they were far away. More sand moved from around my head and cloth scraped my face.
“Jade?” Alek’s voice. Real Alek this time. I smelled him, sweat and musk and nothing like candy.
“Hi,” I croaked. “I’m here.”
I was alive. He was alive. It was a start, but we had much to do.
The first thing I checked after I opened my eyes was my talisman. Samir’s heart was still in its spot on the D20 and the die was still around my neck, the magically reinforced chain holding up. Harper knelt a few feet away as I did and I caught the look of relief on her face as well.
We retreated into the valley a short ways to where there was enough cover that anyone coming over the ridge would have a hard time shooting at us. Aurelio had lost three of his pack. One was somewhere underneath the sand that had been the rock slide. The other two had been carried down and laid beside the newly created dunes.
My body was trying to heal as quickly as it could. My insides itched, somehow. The shield I’d had up during the worst of the tumble had kept most of my bones from breaking as far as I could tell, but I’d only been unconscious under there for an hour at most. Trapped in my mind by Ethan, it had felt like a lot more time had passed.
The second thing I discovered was that the Alpha and Omega had fallen from its sheath at some point during my ride inside the rock slide. There was no sign of the dagger in the sand. I tried not to panic about it. The knife had a way of magically returning to me like a cursed item. Samir’s heart was a tiny gem and it would stay that way for a while even without the blade’s assistance. I hoped, anyway.
The third thing was that my phone had survived. It had a crack in the screen but seemed otherwise intact. Small miracles.
“Any sign of your other three?” I asked Aurelio once I’d gotten a sip of water. My backpack had gone the way of sand as well, but Harper had brought a canteen also.
“No,” Aurelio said with a dark glance up the hill toward the ridge.
They were either sensibly hiding or had been captured, I guessed. Or killed. Or worse. I tried not to think about that as memories of Ethan’s cruelty threatened to rise in my mind.
I sketched out what I had learned as briefly as I could without saying anything about Samir’s heart. It was clear to me that the fewer people who knew about it the better, at least for the moment. I told Aurelio that the sorcerer wanted a thing he believed I had so he could trade it to a vampire. It was basically the truth. Mostly.
“So this sorcerer, Ethan, is doing this because he believes the vampire can give immortality to his dying lover?” The incredulous disgust on Aurelio’s face mirrored the faces around me. “He severed Halfheart. For this?”
“No, he severed him because he’s an evil fuck who hates shifters I guess.”
And because he could, which I kept to myself. I pulled the rats nest that was my braid over my shoulder and tried to smooth it. No, even a rat wouldn’t have a nest this clogged with grit. Another minute to recover and breathe would have been nice but I knew the next thing I was going to propose would cause a riot.
“Where is he?” Aurelio asked even as his eyes turned back to the side of the canyon.
“Over that ridge,” I said. I’d seen as much inside Ethan’s mind. There were two cabins still standing there at the termination of an old logging access road.
“There’s nothing there, just more rock,” he said.
“Illusion.”
Alek handed me the canteen again and I took another sip. All I wanted to do was curl up against him forever. Not piss him off. Again.
“He’s probably going to run, from what I saw in his mind,” I added. “Which is why we have to attack now. I am going to go first and try to break the illusion so you can see where you are going and who to fight.”
“No,” Alek said, as I had known he would. “You are hurt.”
My shoulder was a single throbbing ache and my ribs felt like I’d tried to stop a truck with them but it didn’t matter. I didn’t want to think about how painful using magic was going to be. I’d been burning that pool low for three days now but I had more to give. There was no choice. Ethan wouldn’t stop coming at me.
He wouldn’t stop doing evil, awful things under the pretense of saving Helena, either. And I didn’t want to even contemplate what he’d do, how much worse he’d become once she died. Which she would, because immortality wasn’t, as far as I knew, something you could just conjure up or bargain for.
Harper hadn’t said a word since broke out of the rockslide. She stood a short distance away, staring out into nothing as far as I could tell. But at Alek’s words she turned and nodded at me as she met my gaze.
“She’s right,” Harper said. “We have to end this. It’s not going to get easier.”
Alek made an unhappy noise but he let me hold his arm as I struggled to get my feet under me. I saw his anger and resignation. I wished there was time to tell him what it meant to me that he was here, fighting beside me, keeping me safe. I wished I had the words to let him know that he was protecting me, perhaps not as well physically as he might wish, but that his willingness to follow me into almost certain doom over and over was its own kind of power. Its own kind of saving.
I wanted to tell him that he’d already saved me long ago by showing me that fighting was better than running. That being with those we love was worth the risks of losing them. All I could do was stare into his unhappy blue eyes and try to show him what I felt.
His expression softened and he gave me a slight nod. I didn’t have the words or the time, but love has its own mindreading powers.
“All right,” I said aloud. I leaned more heavily on Alek’s arm than I wanted to as I stood. “Here’s the plan.”
When I’m rested and at full power, flying, at least the only way I’d ever figured out how to fly in the real world, is terrifying and magic-consuming like crazy.
I was not rested. I was more scraping out the jam jar hoping there’d be enough for a meal level of power. But Death from Above was pretty much my entire plan. Nobody ever looks up.
Rising above the edge of the canyon, the plateau up there stretched out in apparent emptiness. I knew what it had looked like in Ethan’s mind, however, and was able to see details of rocks and a few trees that he hadn’t covered in illusion. There was a lone pine standing tall among clumps of grass and a few scattered boulders. It was a strong illusion. Ethan, from what I’d seen in his mind, like to plan. He liked to prepare.
I flew high above the pine. The cabins were near that tree, I was sure of it. Beyond I saw the old logging path snaking into more trees that formed a dark shadow on the quickly dimming landscape as the sun settled ever lower in the sky. My magic was liquid fire in my blood and I fed it every fear I had, every hope, every ounce of rage and pain until my body felt incandescent and my mind a laser focused on what should be below.
Power swirled in purple sparks around my hands. I visualized the spell in a cone attack, feeding more and more magic into it as the sparks spread out like a carpet beneath me. I hoped I’d given Alek and Aurelio and the pack enough time to reach the edge of the ridge but I didn’t dare try to turn and look. It was taking all my concentration to keep hovering here while I worked the second spell.
One last deep breath that caught on my injured ribs and I released the cone, pushing the carpet of sparks down. My body followed them as I dropped from the sky like a bird of prey. The ground reached toward me with far too much speed and I shoved against it with more magic to slow myself.
The sparks hit the illusion and a boom echoed across the canyon. For a moment I had double vision. Rocks and a lone tree. Grasses and sage brush rippling in the breeze giving way to a bare area where the ground was churned up by tires and human feet. Two wooden cabins and the half-collapsed remains of a third appeared, wavered, then solidified.
Half a dozen men in grey and tan fatigues were putting things into two Jeeps parked near a beat-up old truck. As I descended from the sky they started shouting. Wolves broke from the brush around them and I heard Alek’s challenging roar. The men went for their guns.
A rock the size of my head flew at me as I landed, appearing from nowhere. I slammed a shield in place and the rock fizzled on it.
Illusion again.
Ethan ran out of the nearest cabin, a gun in one hand. He threw up his other hand and a wall of stone cut me off from him.
Idiot had brought illusions and a gun to a mage fight. He wasn’t inside my head anymore. We were in the real world now and he was about to find out what kind of sorceress I was. Illusions, mind-magic, trickery, those were his domain. Mine was the liberal and excessive expenditure of awesome destructive power and I was done with his shit.
Purple sparks formed shields around my fists as I charged the wall. I punched my way right through the illusion, ignoring my mind screaming at me that this was solid and going to hurt me. Cotton-candy magic gummed my senses. I added that to Ethan’s list of sins. I had liked cotton-candy.
Ethan shot at me but he clearly hadn’t practiced much with a gun. Hitting a moving target in a stressful situation is difficult even for the well-trained. From how he dropped the large revolver on the recoil, Ethan was far from trained. I charged toward him and sent my power out like tentacles. He tried to shield himself but I smashed through his magic like it was made of the spun sugar it smelled like. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Alek’s white tiger tear a man’s head clear of his body.
Ethan collapsed to his knees as my magic entangled him. He tried to reach for the gun but I made my hands into fists, tightening the tentacles binding him.
“Stop, I yield,” he cried out.
“No shit,” I said. I kept the bonds tight as I stalked toward him, watching my periphery for other attackers.
From the cabin Ethan hadn’t come out of, a wolf started howling. Aurelio charged past in his wolf form, breaking down the cabin’s door with a single powerful slam of his body.
“I left them alive. They are fine,” Ethan said, talking fast as he glanced behind to where the huge black wolf had disappeared. The howling stopped.
I wondered if Ethan thought that would save him. Aurelio, in human form, emerged from the cabin again.
“Keys?” he growled, looking at Ethan with murder in his dark face.
“Larry had them,” the sorcerer said with an audible gulp. “Big guy, red hair.” He looked around.
I couldn’t see behind me but I could guess, from the lack of gunfire or any noise at all, that there were only corpses left of Ethan’s men. A big brown and white wolf trotted past with a keychain dangling from its mouth. Aurelio took the keys and went back into the cabin.
Fatigue put red stars into my vision and my magic ebbed slightly, reminding me I was running out of time before I really had to rest. I had to deal with Ethan.
Alek prowled into the cabin Ethan had been in but emerged moments later. He shifted to human.
“Empty,” he said.
Something about that didn’t sit right with me. I watched Ethan’s face as relief flickered across it before he could school himself back to glaring at me.
“More tricks?” I said to him. “Where’s Helena?” He wouldn’t leave her somewhere, I felt that deep in my aching bones.
Ethan shook his head, the only movement he could manage with my magic wrapped around him like a boa constrictor.
“Watch the cabin door, be careful,” I said to Alek.
He nodded and moved to the side of the door where he would be out of sight, and hard to attack or shoot. Not that the sick woman I’d met in Ethan’s memories was likely to put up much of a challenge. I was glad she was hiding. We’d have to deal with her, too, but it was better perhaps that she not see what came next.
Aurelio emerged from the cabin followed by a limping white wolf. A large reddish-brown wolf and a smaller brown wolf followed. Raw lines marred the wolves’ necks where they had been chained up. They snarled but Aurelio held up a hand.
“She’s dealing with him,” he said as he met my gaze. There was anger and death in his eyes and I knew there was only one kind of justice he would accept.
I took a couple shallow breaths and walked up to Ethan. His flat blue eyes glared up at me.
“I’ll leave,” he said. “We’ll go far away. I promise.”
Even if I had believed him, which I did not, I knew in my broken heart that I couldn’t let him go. Ethan wouldn’t stop trying to save Helena. He wouldn’t stop hurting people, either, in his quest for power. He mistook it for a kind of strength and he loved feeling strong. Helena’s illness, her mortality, they made him helpless and he would rage and destroy whatever he had to in order to try to run from that feeling.
And I knew the truth of his love, too. For inside his mind, through the memories I’d touched, I had seen how he perceived love. How he looked at Helena. She was beautiful and precious to him, but like a pet or a prized doll. I had seen nothing of who she was as a person. Because her personhood wasn’t important to Ethan. There was no give and take, no partnership in their relationship. She was a shiny thing to him, a reflection of his own self-image. He was angry at the world for breaking his toy. He wanted her to go on living so he could keep what he thought of as his.
“You won’t,” I said.
I pushed magic around my hand again, forming violet claws at the end of my fingers. This was never going to get easier. Which was a relief, in some ways. I didn’t want this to ever be easy. I was not Samir and I would fight to the bitter end to never become him.
“No!” Ethan cried out. “Please. You don’t understand. I tried to show you. I have to save her. But you don’t get it do you? You don’t really love.”
He was wrong, wrong in ways he’d never understand. Love meant trust. Trusting others enough to let them be themselves and knowing they would set you free in return. Love was inherently surrender, sacrifice without expectation. No one, no matter how powerful, could control the fate of another. We could only do what we were capable of and hope it was enough.
“You asked me what I wouldn’t do to save the ones I love,” I whispered as I bent close to him. “You assumed I didn’t already know. But I do.”
Because I did. I’d stood in a snow-packed clearing covered in the blood of everyone I cared most about in the world. I’d knelt with all the power of the ley lines beneath Wylde and the River of No Return running through my b
lood and watched my own heart beat in Samir’s hand. I would carry with me forever the image of Alek’s chest open and gushing, his face burned, the light fading from his eyes even as he reached for me one. Last. Time.
And I’d made a decision that day. For love. I’d taken the power that could have ended Samir and I’d rent the very fabric of time and space. I’d turned back what had been our futures and remade the world, possibly breaking things that I couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
Ethan didn’t know this. He wouldn’t understand it. His quest for a cure for Helena, for immortality for her was born from his ultimate desire to be powerful, to fight the helplessness he felt at forces in the world he couldn’t control. His vision was as small and cruel as he was.
He would never stop hurting those he considered weaker. If Helena was cured, or, more likely, when she died, he would go on as he had been. Ethan had tried to crack into my mind and in so doing shone a light into himself. I guess the abyss really does stare back.
“Go to hell,” he said.
I slammed my hand into his chest, my magic claws tearing through flesh and bone to the heart beneath. I pulled it free and brought it to my lips. One bite. That’s all it took. Ethan crumped as I swallowed the chunk of wet, warm flesh.
Nope. Never got easier. Or less gross. Ethan’s power had been nearly drained as well and the drops that fell into my own tapped-out well were pathetic. It would recover with time, as would I. I carefully sealed off the rush of memories that flooded through my mind. I’d have to deal with those, too, at some point. And it was only a matter of time before I was faced with ghost-Ethan in my head.
But not today. I wanted a shower and a milkshake the size of a car and about three days of uninterrupted sleep. In that order but I wasn’t about to be picky.
