by Leigh Evans
“Son of Lukynae!” they howled as Trowbridge’s body began to shake.
I’ll never know whether Trowbridge allowed it to happen or he couldn’t stop it from happening. But part of me crumbled as my mate finally bowed over his knees, his hands flattening on the earth. Then, some unseen force gave him a final heave and threw him violently forward. He sprawled onto his gut, his legs spread, his cheek pressed to the ground.
He did not get up.
The king of the court leaned over Trowbridge’s prostrate form to thrust two fingers between Ralph’s chain and his neck. Jaden worked the amulet up over my mate’s chin and then ruthlessly yanked it free. Then the Fae straightened, and in a dreadful mimicry of the Raha’ells’ raised fists he lifted Ralph high in his own.
He pumped his arm twice—smiling to the fading chants of “Son of Lukynae! Son of Lukynae!”—and then pivoted from the waist to play to his audience of entourage.
Yeah. He waved Ralph like he was a freakin’ prize.
Blood from Trowbridge’s torn ear snaked across his jaw.
“Mage!” I warned in a dreadful voice.
Mutter, mutter—
The final ward broke with a deafening boom, followed by a flash-bomb of cold light that bathed all the items in the rooms—the wizard, the pine table, the once creamy pages of the book and me—with a horrendous lime green.
“Torch the book!” I screamed, reaching to pull Merry off my neck.
The old man conjured up a miniature fireball, as easily as I might flick a lighter, and tipped his hand sideways. The tiny burning ball fell on the book’s curling pages.
Whoosh.
That easy. The Book of Spells was aflame.
“And now my vow to my Maker is complete,” he said, staring at the blaze.
Bully for you. I swung back for the window, prepped to do my part and see the prophecy through. And as I did, I heard the old wizard speak again and I smelled magic, but it was magic of the dreadful sort, sweet as cane sugar, as oddly thick as an overripe banana.
Then I got hit with a custom-made conjure.
Chapter Twenty-six
I was struck, mid-torso, by a blast of pure energy. No sparks, no light, no blare of trumpets to warm me. It felt as if Goliath had made a fist and punched me in the gut. It hurt so badly; there was an element of disbelief to the pain. Ever hit your shinbone hard enough to feel light-headed?
My magic surged from me as I staggered backward, and without even thinking we reacted. Take this. My talent whipped across the room, a green serpent cast on doing some damage on a lying piece of shit.
But as she flew, the wizard swiftly made a motion. A shield! It was too late to issue a magic-recall and far too late to recalculate the GPS. She hit his ward with an inarticulate cry of horror. Instinctively I wrenched my hand back. Instead of popping free, she stretched obscenely, her nose firmly attached to that thing he’d cast.
“Give me the word!” I shouted. My magic rippled and rolled, panicked to free herself from the sucking ward that held her fast. My arm bucked with each of her gyrations. “The king’s going to kill Trowbridge!”
“Not yet,” the wizard murmured. “He’ll toy with him first.”
“You son of a bitch! Give me the word!”
“Be calm. Accept your fate.”
“Death?” I choked out. “We die, you die.”
“Rest easy, nalera.” He brushed the soot off his sleeve. “Neither you nor he will face an execution. There is no need, for there are alternatives to death.” He glanced down at what remained of his book. “Punishments that inflict no physical pain. Prisons that have no bars.”
My magic thrashed at the end of my line, a tuna running on the hook. I both felt her wild gyrations and didn’t, because my brain was taking the pieces of his word puzzle and putting them in awful order.
“The Sleep of Forever,” I whispered.
The Old Mage nodded. “Precisely so.”
Trowbridge and I lay in some dark and dim room, our bodies useless, only our brains awake. Two wolves caught in a forever trap.
The wizard picked up a page, grimacing when it crumbled to ash. “Rest assured the Royal Court will not risk losing their only wizard. In light of the circumstances, they will be agreeable to condemning both of you to an eternal rest.”
“But you’re not their only wizard.”
He looked up. “I will be.”
I could hear my talent inside my head; she was screaming.
“You planned this,” I said shakily. “Right from the beginning when you forced me to switch places with Lexi so your soul could share his body and not mine. You wanted to claim his muscles as your own. His legs, yours; his voice, yours. You never intended to share, not for three days, not for a week. Before I even agreed to your bargain, you were calculating how to smother his soul.”
He pushed himself from his lectern. “You give me an omniscience I do not possess. One might anticipate the future, but one may never fully control it. A mage must always react to new circumstances, choosing the best option among the opportunities presented. But yes, the demise of your brother’s soul was certainly predetermined as soon as our pact was sealed. I cannot share a body with one who is unwilling to take care of it.” He studied me for a moment. “Will you accept your destiny calmly?”
“No.”
He snapped his fingers.
And with that gesture, the fire that always made my fingers tight and my blood race began to cool. Sweet heavens … no. In front of my eyes, my talent’s color—that glorious vibrant shade—faded from a flashing florescence to a watery, icy green.
“Stop it,” I said.
“As you wish.” He waved his hand, and the suction that had kept her blind head attached to the invisible wall seemed to break. She slumped, limp. Using both hands, I hauled her toward me, trying to gather her thinned body into the safety of my embrace. But with each tug, she frayed and split a bit more.
And then, she broke apart into fragments.
Pale flickers of bits of magic sought to form a shape and failed. Without direction, they rose in a disorganized cluster, seeking an exit and not finding one, because the one that had hurt them stood between them and the window. So they went higher, streaming toward the tower’s domed ceiling, stopping short of it at a rafter. One bit attached itself, and then more layered on, until they resembled a swarm of honeybees.
“Magic-mine,” I whispered, my tone broken.
“Now you have no more magic than your brother,” he said.
I tore my gaze from her and saw that hidden smirk. “I’m going—” I didn’t finish the threat; I just went for him.
The pine table was between us.
He flicked a finger—just one—and that table flipped over, not a slow slide but with supernatural speed, and not as a result of Newton’s law but at the wizard’s behest.
The harvest table became the flyswatter and I the fly.
It carried me for a few feet. Merry went with me, tumbling and bouncing against my chest. Then, it flipped over to crush me under its weight.
It was just an old pine table and everybody knows that pine is supposed to be a light wood, but I could barely breathe under its supernaturally oppressive weight. I could barely turn my head, the fit was so tight.
Merry scrambled up to the hollow of my neck, her feet stiff with distress.
Have to get it off me.
I am wolf, and I am girl, and those two words put together mean “powerful,” but the wolf had been half-starved and well beaten and the girl … she’d been beaten too. The best she could do to raise the ponderous load was a shortened arm curl. I gave that a try, and the animated table pushed right back with a brute force devoid of sentiment or empathy.
Oh Goddess, I’m going to suffocate.
Every inhale only encouraged the table to bear down harder.
We’re trapped. Again. The memory of the wolf trap and that horrible fear was too fresh. I started to panic, pounding on the wood with my fists, calling
for my magic.
Help us!
With three we’re stronger.
“God’s teeth,” he said irritably. “Cease your struggles.”
Words almost guaranteed to send me into a tizzy of rebellion. But taking out my fear and frustration on the cursed object squeezing down on me hurt me much more, because the table took insult to being beaten by my fists.
Calm down. You’re only hurting yourself more.
I told myself that I didn’t need as much air as I thought I needed. That I had to take shallower breaths. Think my way out of this. Don’t pant. Don’t panic. I fought to adjust. To the table’s weight. To my terrifying vulnerability. To the fact that I couldn’t hear my magic and that the coil of her was no longer a warm weight attached to my hand.
I needed a focus point. I rolled my eyes toward the Old Mage. The toes of his shoes curled upward. The hem of his robe was rimmed with dust.
You stole my magic. And now, you’re trying to hijack my destiny.
No.
This is NOT how it’s going to end.
* * *
“I must reintroduce myself to my court,” he murmured, strolling over to the window. For a second or two, he just stood there, checking things out at the Spectacle grounds—a handy target for an arrow or a meteor shower of fireballs.
Come on. Take him out.
But not one single shaft whistled through the window’s open arch. Even when he propped a bony hip on the window ledge and leaned an arm out.
Somebody shoot him.
What he did next was simple and awful. He opened his palm—pretty much like someone checking to see if it was raining—and said, “To me.”
Just like I said “to me” when I talking to my talent.
Except the world doesn’t tremble when magic-mine and I have a one-sided conversation. People don’t shriek in abject terror. Skies don’t rumble, and lightning doesn’t flash. And the stink of ozone doesn’t squash the scent of every living thing.
The Old Mage backed into the room, holding out his arms stiffly, and as he did the barometer plunged inside his lair and the magic pressing down on me became unbearably heavy. Above his lined palm was a thin curl of cloud smoke—foul smelling, spitting red bits of ugly stuff.
I forgot about not panting. I forgot about being calm.
Goddess, he’s brought that evil into this small box of a room. With growing horror, I witnessed the mother jinx’s tongue touching his fate line. She tasted it, and when she found the dry skin agreeable I watched her give herself to him.
She streamed into his flesh.
She poured into his palm.
And the rest of her—the huge, stinking, thunderous mass that boiled in the sky above the Spectacle grounds—followed.
It was a small room, not built for that much magical energy, and the mother jinx funneled through the open window like a twister coming in for a touchdown. Her noise was the howl of a crazed wind, the shriek of magic unleashed. She circled her mage, and the old man smiled broadly, his head turning to and fro, as he watched the mage-loving tornado turn around him.
Other things were caught in the vortex of that evil. Baskets, pinecones, glass vials, books, dried small animal parts, herbs, and, strangely enough, a perfectly upright stool.
But not the harvest table.
Nor the girl being panini-pressed beneath its weight.
Or, for that matter, a hive of stunned bees, clinging to a rafter.
When the wind began dying and the ozone began clearing, the breakable items that had been pulled into the air fell and broke. Glass shattered; baskets rolled; the stool landed with a thud, its legs sticking upward.
“Yes.” The Old Mage’s back was to me. “Now, they’ve noticed me.”
I felt another rib go.
“Magic-mine,” I gasped, “come to me.”
The wizard leaned out of the window to shout, “I have come back from death, Helzekiel! How dare you parade my accomplishments as yours, you whoreson!”
Helzekiel had a response for that.
The old guy saw it coming, and faster than I would have given him credit for being capable of doing, he jackrabbited back into the room, narrowly avoiding the fireball that whizzed through the window.
Whoosh. The Black Mage’s balyfire imploded on the wall near the doorway.
Sparks burned through the denim on my right leg, and a sheet of them cascaded from the lip of the table pressed upon me. If they start whizzing fireballs in here, I’m going to be Joan of Arc. Helpless, I watched the old wizard straighten his clothing and smooth his hair with the hand that wasn’t clenched into a tight fist.
“And now, we wait,” he said, sounding satisfied.
“I’m going to kill you,” I promised.
The table grew heavier by another ton.
* * *
I may or may not have had a brief time-out there. I couldn’t move my head anymore, not from side to side, anyhow, and soon the overall pressure became intolerable. Dots formed; blackness encroached …
The thudding of many feet roused me from my daze.
They’re coming, I thought. The court, the guards … all of them … and all our plans …
It’s done. Our epic quest is finished.
Trowbridge, I’m sorry.
I gazed up at my talent and condemned her for her cowardice. We could have been stronger together. We could have fought together.
The three of us: Hedi. Wolf. Magic.
Couldn’t she see that?
Then, strangely enough, I heard echoed shouts from the bottom of the stairwell. A loud argument ensued, though the words were mostly indistinguishable. The dispute was followed by a pause, then the sound of a single pair of feet mounting the stairs at breakneck speed.
One man. Not an army.
How fast could someone climb seventy-two stairs if he was hauling ass?
I concentrated on my magic, willing her to hear me.
There’s still time, I told her. We need you.
And you need us.
* * *
Helzekiel might be Mr. Evil Black Mage, but taking those stairs at a gallop winded him. From the hall I could hear him struggling to catch his breath. It was overloud, a scorching inhale followed all too quickly by a hoarse exhale. He took but a moment to collect himself before trying the door’s latch.
I heard it swing open.
“You!” he hissed.
With the weight of pine pressing on my temple, I couldn’t turn my head to personally witness what new hell was coming my way. But I knew it was the Black Mage, because he carried with him a presence of darkness.
Let one of them kill the other. It will give me time. My gaze moved from the hive that glimmered weakly, out of reach—hear my call, magic-mine—to the Old Mage, who stood framed by the window.
Intent was written on his face, and his clenched hand … it glowed. The clouds had fed on the hunt and supped from the Raha’ells’ pain. And perhaps it had taken not their lives and their hurts but a portion of their soul-lights too.
Could that be done? I don’t know.
But magic turned dark, glowered inside his palm, red and angry, making his flesh appear pink and translucent. His finger bones gleamed, long gray-white ribs, and his knuckles—
Oh, shit.
Those knuckle bones tightened.
The old man flicked his wrist and threw.
The curse’s flight was soundless. But as it whizzed over my table, the entire room seemed to flex in its wake. The burden crushing me briefly lifted, the table being caught in the suction of the aftershock. I hauled in a much-needed quick breath before the ponderous weight crashed back down on me.
Another rib broke.
* * *
When the Old Mage’s curse hit, it exploded over the door, not the assistant.
There was whomp of pushed air like a giant’s hand wiping a slate clean, and then I was experiencing the horror of being trapped and helpless as the tower room’s heavy oak splintered into a detonation of
dagger-tipped shards.
Old wood was turned to toothpick tinder and spikes of javelin-sharp terror—and it felt like three-quarters of it was rat-tat-tatting into my pine table. But by divine intervention, not a single shard ripped into the body of the girl who lay beneath the pine slab’s protection.
However, one long-tipped missile found a soft target.
The Old Mage cried out and folded at his waist. Big hero that he was, his bandy legs held him for a half second; then he slumped slowly to the floor near me. He fell to his knees, his legs splayed wide open, his hands clutching his belly. Then, his chin lifted and he stared at me in wounded and childish surprise.
Good, I thought savagely, knowing with one glance that it had to be excruciatingly painful. The splinter of wood was driven deep into his side. You haven’t felt pain for a long time, have you, buddy?
Some men—be they Fae, or mortal, or something in between—aren’t born heroes. They’re plotters, quick to spot the opportunity. Thus, in the face of agony, the mage did what he was inclined to do naturally—he stepped back from the source of his pain and let someone else endure it. His illusion started to melt away. Jowls firmed; the pore-heavy skin smoothed; the eye pouches lifted.
Bit by bit, the man beneath was revealed.
One long sweep of matted hair, one pair of haunted eyes.
I stared at Lexi.
You look so battered. So pale. So sickly.
“Lexi?” I gasped.
“Shhhh.” My twin made a fearsome face, his features twisting in extreme effort, the way they once did when he was a kid and deeply focused on something.
All I could think was—
Don’t die. Not in front of me.
Not while I can’t do anything for you but watch.
He grunted through his teeth, and suddenly the punishing weight on top of me went away. Without any visible abracadabra, the table ceased being a three-ton curse and returned to being a table.
I could breathe. I could twist my head.
I flattened my palms on the pine slab and pushed. Seconds earlier it had been a heavy torture, but now it lifted relatively easily, if one didn’t take into account a few broken ribs. It raised with my effort, a foot at first, then more—enough for me to brace my knee under it. It took a howl of pain and another heave to breach the table’s point of balance.
