by Monica Sanz
She bent forward, resting her forehead against his. “I’m so sorry, Timothy. I’m so sorry.”
A broken, bloodied smile twitched at his lip. “My love,” he whispered. He lifted a hand to her face, but with a blink of those clear blue eyes, his hand fell lifeless at his side.
“It is done,” Noah whispered. “The Master will be pleased.”
Sera sucked in a breath, but her lungs locked and refused it. She clutched her bound hands at his chest where his heart did not beat. “Timothy?” she croaked.
A blast cut through her mourning, then another, and another. Startled, Sera ducked into Timothy as magic clashed and burst around her, trailed by the Brothers’ screams as Noah killed them all. Shots hurtled toward Noah haloed in white, but he brushed them away with ease, a flick of the hand, a wave of his wand. One orb ricocheted off the tip of his wand and crashed against the pillar beside Mary, who screamed and ducked, the rubble exploding outward. She held her arms over her head as the stone, dirt, and weeds rained down on her. Sera lifted her eyes as another blast of magic whisked past her and slammed into the last Brother behind her. He crumpled to the ground, a fire-rimmed hole glowing in his chest.
“Can’t have them knowing the spell, now can we?” Noah muttered.
Breathless, Sera slumped back, her chest heaving. Noah remained standing through the haze of lingering smoke and magic, unaffected. To the right of them, Mary struggled to her feet, and Sera paused. An unnerving awareness spread within her, a heavy burden that made it hard to breathe.
Noah turned his wand at Mary.
Eyes wide, she shifted back against the pillar as if she could vanish into it. “I did what you asked,” she cried, frantic and ungraceful. “I did what you—”
Noah speared a black orb of magic at her.
“No!” Sera raised a hand, meeting his flare with a flare of her own. A thunderous clash resounded at the collision that thrust his magic off course and into the wall.
Noah turned a venomous gaze to Sera, a look she’d been at the end of many times before. He whipped binds around her wrists, scalding ropes of black smoke cutting deep into her flesh. Though they’d spent years apart, their connection forged itself immediately, and at once she felt him everywhere, an impermeable mist crowding and filling her. The scars on her body scorched to life as though recognizing their maker. Sera clenched her teeth and stifled a roar. Her magic scattered under the intense pain that twisted her heart in her chest. The ache was alive and wormed its way behind her eyes and to the top of her skull. Her stomach twisted, and the same sick sensation lurched in her throat as he pushed closer, seeking to tap into her reserves.
Sera refused him and held the spool of her powers so tight, the underside of her skin burned from the strain.
A slow grin twisted his lips. You still insist on fighting me? Let me in, little bird, he spoke into their connection. Nothing’s changed; you won’t win this.
He wouldn’t kill her, no. He swore a blood oath he wouldn’t, but there in his eyes was a promise. He would drain her within an inch of her life.
Never again.
Unafraid, Sera released her hold on her powers. A surge of fire roared out from her belly—hot and angry, but controlled flames that forced his shackles from around her wrists and destroyed their connection. Shafts of fire whipped from her hands and pushed back Noah’s magic.
Their warring magic spurred wild winds around them. Her hands trembled, her magic fanning outward as though splintered. Still, she struggled to keep her powers in check. One burst could deplete her reserves in an instant, and then she’d be at Noah’s mercy. She didn’t mind death, not with the agony and guilt that hollowed her soul. But not here. Not now. She had lost Timothy. Had lost Mary. She would not lose herself.
Determination, cold and cruel, roared upward in a wave of heat within her, and her magic pushed Noah’s back. She looked at Mary pressed against the pillar, sobbing into her hands, and her eyes flooded with tears.
Memories of them together flashed quickly through her mind as if spurred by the savage winds that whipped around them. Unwittingly she cast them out into the smoke that haloed their opposing magic. Images of meeting Mary her very first day at the Academy played out like flashes of lightning. When Mary popped her head into the room, her smile a ray of light during a tempest of anger. Weekends spent in the tower room, laughing at the latest gossip…or Sera comforting her after another letter had come from her mother. All of it could have been real. They could have been real friends, real sisters.
And she’d betrayed it all.
Lost in these thoughts, the pressure in her core grew to a steady hum that vibrated along her skin. The white beam of her power focused from its erratic wisps into a single channel of white. Noah pulsed his magic again, but digging her heel into the ground, Sera shouldered against it. Still, he was stronger, and within seconds his magic had pushed closer.
She wouldn’t be able to do this alone. Her pain was not enough to defeat his evil. But she knew of a pain that was…
Agatha Beechworth.
Briar Wakefield.
Catherine Yates.
Elsie Godwin.
Harriet Adams.
Winnie Forge.
Ophelia Crowe.
Holding fast to their names in her mind, Sera focused on their screams, their tears, their lives lost to this monster and his vicious cause. Pressure mounted in her temples as her power split, half into fighting Noah, the other into a summoning. White fog crept out from her shaft of magic, its phantom fingers webbing along the floor and up the walls, encircling her and Noah in a cool white cloud. Shadows appeared in the fog again, standing side by side. Wide eyed, Noah watched them materialize one by one. They were everywhere—girls and women, young and old, dressed in modern attire and clothes of a time long gone. Their smoky bodies turned to Sera; they each placed a hand on their hearts. A black line tattoo marked their wrists. Seventhborns.
Whispers crowded her mind, colliding against one another. Yet, here in the midst of her battle, Sera understood their plea.
Show you…
Barrington had warned her that channeling without an anchor was a risk, but Sera nodded. He’d grown to be her anchor, whether beside her or miles away.
“Yes, show me,” she cried. “I want to feel it all.”
Every tear. Every pain. Every unfulfilled dream. Every lost love.
Myriad hands came upon her, fingers gripping desperately at her limbs. Voices—sobs and prayers and mournful wails—flooded her thoughts and screamed in her mind as the seventhborns fed their pain into her consciousness, their tears and frustrations, their fears and their deaths.
A cry grew in Sera’s throat. Raw heat flushed through her veins, and she felt as if she was dissolving in layers; first her clothes, then her skin. Blood and organs, veins and bones. Until only her soul remained. Here in this immaterial state, the channeled pain was blinding and heavy and terrible—it was theirs. Every ache borne over being a seventhborn bled into Sera, and the heat of her powers grew.
“No!” Noah screamed, clenching his teeth against Sera’s fire overcoming his.
The pain of the gathered power crested, and she knew she had to release it or it would consume her.
She surrendered to magic.
Black spouts of smoke whirled around the funnel of her power, enveloping it, forcing it into a single shaft of pure black fire. Noah’s eyes widened. The black flames overcame his and pushed closer to him, closer, and swallowed him whole.
Her reserves plummeted and weak, Sera’s knees buckled, and she collapsed. The dead seventhborns surrounding her lowered their hands, and their voices faded from her head. One by one, they inclined their heads at her and turned, walking back into the cool fog that soon dissipated around her.
…
For some time, Sera and Mary coexisted in complete silence, the mournful howls of the wind the only sound. Her wand before her, Sera did not release Timothy’s body, and Mary did not move from beside the pill
ar.
“Pick up your wand,” Mary ordered, her voice deadened. She peeled away from the wall and walked across from Sera, a specter in the moonlight. “We can’t stay in this church forever, and regardless of how tight you hold him, he’s never coming back.”
Sera glared at her from over Timothy’s head pressed against her chest. “I won’t waste my magic on you.”
Mary’s mouth trembled, her eyes filled with tears. “You must fight me. The Brotherhood will never let me live after this.” She kicked Sera’s wand closer, the plea clear in her eyes. “I will not kill you without a fair fight.”
Sera chuckled into Timothy’s hair. “A fair fight? You’ve found your morals, I see.”
“This was not easy for me, either, Sera. But my father, he had unsurmountable debts. How else do you think he managed to go from nothing to a well-respected healer? The more magic he had, the more patients he could see. The Brotherhood, they promised him as much blood magic as he needed in exchange for his cooperation in the future. And they called on that debt. Don’t you see? Refusing them would have been the same as signing my death sentence and my family’s.”
“You signed it the moment you betrayed us.”
She wiped one of her tears roughly. “I had no choice—”
“How can I trust anything you say?”
Mary recoiled at the anger in Sera’s words, more of her tears falling.
“You were my sister, the only thing that kept me sane in this godforsaken place. I would have died for you, I nearly did, and it was all for this? For these monsters?” Her words slurred through her own tears.
“You think I wanted this, Sera? All I’ve done was try to protect you. I overheard my father say the Brotherhood sought powerful seventhborns and had their eye on seventhborns at the Academy. I knew I had to find a way to keep you safe without revealing my parents’ association with them, so I told Susan about your scars, then used Mrs. Fairfax to help Whittaker break into the records room so he could steal your file. I thought you’d be too embarrassed and would leave the Academy. That way the Brotherhood couldn’t hurt you.”
Air rushed into Sera’s chest, and her heart heaved. Mrs. Fairfax’s tearful plea for forgiveness had been Mary all along?
“I tried, Sera. I tried to get you away before they came for you. Had I known they were in the forest that night, I never would have run out there. All I’ve ever wanted was to keep you safe, but then they requested my cooperation. If I didn’t do what was asked of me, they would have killed me and my family. The way my mother begged me to save them… I had no choice. You have to believe me. I never wanted to hurt you. All I ever did was for you, Sera. I love you.”
The church doors exploded open. Aetherium guards swept inside, their illuminated wands drawn and aimed at Sera and Mary as they encircled them. Three guards swept into the circle and lifted Timothy’s body out of her arms, quickly carrying him to where Sera could no longer see him. Another guard dragged Sera up to her feet.
“Identify yourselves!” a guard demanded. He was dressed in a forest-green robe and, unlike the other guards, he carried no wand and wore an Invocation ring. Sera knew him to be a Lead Inspector. He looked at Mary. “Did this seventhborn harm you?”
Sera braced. No doubt Mary would play the victim and blame her for everything—for Timothy’s death, for working with the Brotherhood—and with her word against a seventhborn’s, everyone would believe her.
“No,” Mary whispered, a tear streaming down her cheek. She thrust her wand on the ground. “I hurt her.”
Folding one knee, then the other, she knelt down and held her hands in front of her, her wrists touching. “My name is Mary Tenant. It was me who pushed Mrs. Fairfax down the stairs at the Aetherium’s Witchling Academy and tethered myself to her reserves. I then possessed her and instructed her to break into the Academy’s records room. I lured Miss Dovetail and Mr. Delacort here under instructions from the Brotherhood…”
While Mary confessed to her crimes, commotion behind Sera drew her attention. She turned just as the officers parted and let Professor Barrington through. He rushed into the circle and stopped before her, his skin pale, his hair as disheveled and rumpled as his half tucked-in shirt and open cloak. Worry saturated his stare that he trailed along her quickly, as if wanting to make sure she was okay in one look.
He met her gaze and exhaled deeply, relief washing over his tense frame. “Sera.”
The sound of her name from his lips was a whisper yet struck into her like a whirlwind.
“Nik.” Hot tears pooled in her eyes, rendering him a speckled mess of light and shadow. Agony, shame, remorse, and mourning gripped her with a vengeance. Her chest locked, her lungs refused, and her knees gave out beneath her.
But she didn’t fall.
Strong arms came around her and, proprieties aside, Barrington held her, a quiet wall supporting her as she seized his lapels, breathless, and twisted them the way her insides churned. Every tear and sob caged in her heart for years burst from the deepest parts of her soul. From Noah’s evil to Mary’s betrayal to Timothy’s sacrifice. From a family she sought to the curse of being a seventhborn.
For the first time, she broke, wholly, with no desire to be strong.
For the first time, she allowed herself to be held, allowed herself to feel human.
Allowed herself to be cared for, too.
Epilogue
Sera stood before the worktable in Barrington’s home, shafts of light flooding through the arched windows behind her. She set aside the book she had chosen to read that morning—The Ethics of Hydromancy—once again drawn to the letter she received a week ago, signaling her last day at the Aetherium’s Witchling Academy. Though she’d committed its disappointing words to memory, she read them once more.
For your direct involvement in incidents leading to the death of Mr. Timothy Delacort, you have been removed from the Aetherium’s Seventhborn Program effective immediately.
Heat gathered in her cheeks, but she rejected the coming tears and thrust the note into a brass crucible in the middle of the table. It was childish to pretend the outcome would have been otherwise. Timothy’s father had told her what would happen if she didn’t stay away from his son, and he’d been a man of his word.
Since her expulsion from the Academy, Barrington had welcomed her into his home. However temporary, she was grateful for his kindness.
She tapped the edge of the kettle with her wand and sparked a flame inside. Whirls of smoke and licks of fire billowed upward as red, fiery tentacles wound about the letter and consumed it.
“Trying to burn down my home again, I see.”
Sera startled at the deep baritone and lifted her head to Professor Barrington leaning against the doorframe, still dressed in his professorial robes. After Mrs. York vouched for his being at the scene, no one suspected their relationship extended beyond that of a professor and a student, and his employment remained unaffected. Sera lowered her eyes to the note now wrapped in flames. If only she could say the same.
“I had no reason to keep it. Regardless of how many times I read it, the outcome won’t ever change.”
They stood in silence until the flames devoured the note and extinguished. Whirls of white smoke then twirled from within the crucible. Sera sighed and closed the book she had been reading.
Barrington glanced at the cover and hummed. “Hydromancy?”
“I was hoping to scry for Mary, but seeing as I missed all my Water-level courses, my progress was nonexistent. It’s useless to worry, I know, but I keep wondering if the spell is truly safe.” Reason told her it was. Mrs. York had all the bones found at the scene stored in a vault lest a necromancer decide to raise any of the Brothers and recover the spell. Barrington then assured her Noah’s spirit could not be summoned. She might have doubted him, had she not come across a black magic spell on his desk used to bind spirits after death.
But Sera lowered her eyes to the Hydromancy book; that wasn’t the only reason she scried
for Mary. In addition to all Mary had confessed that fateful day at the church, later inquiries revealed her infatuation with Timothy had been nothing more than her parents’ orders. If she married Timothy, her family would be protected by the Delacort name and his father’s Aetherium status. Sadly, the Tenants had since disappeared, leaving Mary alone to pay for their sins.
Sera pressed a hand to her chest, the words of Mary’s confession a ghost haunting her thoughts.
I did it all for you, Sera. I love you.
Everything Mary had done was to protect others, and ultimately, she took the fall. The least Sera could do was look after her. Even if she never fully forgave the girl, she still loved her, too.
“The spell is safe,” Barrington said, tearing her from thought. He undid the tie of his professorial robes, revealing his all-black attire underneath. Since Timothy’s death, the Academy was in mourning. Sera smoothed down the black gown she wore; a part of her would always be in mourning, too. “And so is Miss Tenant. Where she is, no one will find her.”
“But how can we be sure? Her father worked with the Brotherhood. Maybe they’ve reached out to her somehow, perhaps threatened her. If they get their hands on the spell, I fear for any line of seven sisters.”
She started to open the book again when Barrington’s hand came above the cover, and he gently closed it.
“Miss Dovetail,” he said, much softer this time. Sera’s fingers tightened on the edge of the book, his voice a balm to her fear and kindling to her heart. “Mrs. York came to the Academy today.”
“What did she say?” she asked quickly, lowering onto a stool. The worry that her dread had been confirmed—that Mary had indeed heard the spell and shared it—drummed her pulse in her ears.
He leaned on the edge of the table, his legs crossed at his ankles. “Mrs. York had Miss Tenant sent away. I am not sure where. Not many people know. It is for her safety as well. We recognize that, in the end, she was also a pawn. Miss Tenant swears she didn’t hear anything, and after various questionings, Inspector Lewis believes she tells the truth. There is a chance she lies, but Mrs. York has assured me that where she is, there will be no one to tell.”
