“And the stag?” I glanced at the reeling animal.
“He’s seen better days, but he can take care of himself. I think he’s going to be all right for now.”
33
In the end, Marianne had to help me put out the fire in my wounds. It was trickier than I thought. Water wasn’t enough; herbs and words were required.
“The fire loves you,” she said when we’d managed to extinguish it at last. “It might be more difficult now to keep it away from you.”
“Great.” Another creepy thing to worry about.
We were sitting on a matching set of low, flat stones, away from the fire, because of that. She’d given me some water and pieces of nondescript cloth to clean my wounds. She’d said it would be better if she didn’t touch them, and the creepy expression had returned to her face, so I hadn’t insisted that she help me, even if it was kind of awkward and clumsy to try and bandage one’s own hands. I had the distinct impression that she needed me to hide my wounds more than anything else.
I was knackered, wired, and sick with worry for Tristan and for myself. I’d left my body some time ago; who knew if there was going to be something for me to go back to when this little escapade in death was over? Was my body here with me, or had it stayed over there? Those were all very interesting questions, and ones I didn’t really have any time for.
“From what you’ve told me,” Marianne summed up, “you need to recover from the spell in these boxes, and do it quickly, so that you can escape to Tristan instead of calling him to you. The more you wait, the more difficult it’s going to be not to summon him. Be careful.”
“Kill that spell? Is that even possible?”
“Hughes is afraid of you,” she added with confidence. “He doesn’t think he has you just yet. There’s still hope for you and he knows it. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have followed you here or sent his wolves after you.”
“What if he followed me here just to get to that thing he’s looking for? The old magic. You said it was in the woods.”
She shook her head. “Not in these woods. No, he’s here for you, he must have sensed you were going to escape him, and he’s afraid of losing you.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but in any case, I needed to lead the pack of wolves away from this clearing, from Marianne and the stag.
“So, what should I do?”
“A good part of that spell is in your head. To unravel the trap, you need to find its core,” she thought.
“Its core?”
She nodded. “Every spell has one. A core, a source, a contraction in reality. It’s like the tiny grain of sand that turns into a pearl eventually because it’s making the oyster crazy. Except some spells, like this one, are a lot uglier than pearls. This spell here has been festering in those boxes for years.”
“You really think Hughes put them there four years ago? I thought they were more recent than that.” It made no sense. Four years ago, I was a different person. I had nothing to do with the Rentier family.
“No,” Marianne clarified, “I’m just saying Hughes put a hook four years into your past, and that’s where the spell comes from. So virtually, that spell is a four-year-old black magic zombie.”
Huh. Now that was confusing. I thought about it, eyes on the fire. I kind of missed the fire now, not because I was cold, but because…well, I missed the weird sense of companionship it had brought me for a few minutes. And I thought the fire had liked it, too—that I was still alive in a place where all things were supposed to be dead, I guessed.
“And what about the death mark?” I asked. “When and how did someone put a freaking death mark on me?”
“That’s another very good question. And even more interesting, depending on who and what you are, we don’t know if that person was a foe, or a friend.”
I pushed out my lower lip in a pout. Okay. First things first. The boxes. The sand grain. The storage contract. Something had been metaphorically boxed years ago, and now, it was coming back to bite me in the ass.
“I don’t remember anything in my past that would act like that grain of sand,” I complained. “Well, there was the accident, obviously, but I still fail to see the link to what’s happening today.”
“Well, you gotta. It doesn’t necessarily have to make sense, but you need to remember. It’s seriously the only way.”
“Can you help me do that? Is there a spell, something, anything?”
But she just shook her head. I buried my face into my sloppily bandaged hands. For the love of angry guitar riffs, why me?
In the near distance, a wolf howled.
“Hughes is coming,” Marianne whispered, fear in her voice.
I raised my head in panic. It was too early! We weren’t done. I didn’t understand anything and had no clue as to how I was going to back out of that impasse.
“If I go now, will Hughes leave you in peace?”
“Yes. I’m sure he’s after you.”
“Can you send me back now?”
She smiled and stood up from her seat just as I rose to my increasingly unsteady legs. She hugged me. She was very cold, even colder than her brother when he left the realms to walk in my world.
“You got this,” she said. “You can do it. Remember, magic doesn’t seem to work all that well on you. Or at least, it works differently. You can shake this off. I believe in you.”
“Thank you.”
She kissed my cheek. Her lips were ice-cold and lingered for a moment. I gasped and cut myself on the cheek on a piece of metallic thorn, just nearly avoiding the one near my eye.
I was back in the cellar at the Victory Bar.
34
The party was still raging just above me. Feet away, people were dancing, drinking, laughing, having fun, while I was here…dying, by the looks of it.
The only upside to my new situation was that Hughes wasn’t in the cellar with me. But I wasn’t sure this was such good news. What if he really was after Marianne? Could you kill a dead woman? Hurt her?
Choosing my eye over my neck, my kidney over my thigh, I rearranged myself in my nest of thorns, accepting the pain, easing into it. The bandages on my hands had come back with me from my incursion in the realm of death, while my nice heels hadn’t. I was smaller as a result and needed to stand on my toes to fit better in my spiked nook.
So…apparently, when you went over to that place of death, you really went there, with your body and all. And then, too bad, you got sent back to the exact same place you’d left. My life was too weird for words these days. It would also be quickly over if I didn’t find the spot in my past that had served as a hook for this deadly trap.
Unravel the spell. It was easier said than done. Find the hook. Rewind, debug, erase. Find out why I would even do this to myself—pin my own body in a cage made of thorns?
Somehow, a part of me must still be trapped in that elevator. I’d been convinced that I’d moved on, but something in me hadn’t. I should have tried to understand, maybe called up the people I’d seen that day, or gone back to Paris to look at the building and see if it triggered memories. I should have searched for answers. But I’d been so sure that past was behind me. It didn’t seem to have left any scars in me. I wasn’t terrified of elevators, heights, or anything—no more than any sane person. I’d thought my life was in order now.
The thorns kept digging in my leg, underneath my ear, into my fingers, causing blinding, piercing pain. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, but it hurt so much I had trouble even thinking.
Remember, dammit. What is there to remember?
May 7th, four years ago. My mind searched through time, trying to see and live through the accident again. I remembered finding the classified: some old lady was selling her piano. I’d taken the metro to a posh part of town, not too far from the Seine, and found the old building easily. Except the old lady had just died, and her grandson wouldn’t get rid of the instrument anymore, or even let me see it. He’d been adamant and more than a lit
tle aggressive. Most probably he’d been mourning and in pain. I remembered coming out of the confrontation shaken, with trembling hands and a chaotic mind.
I tried to see the man again, but his face didn’t want to show up in my imagination. I didn’t know if he was important. I could still feel the light weight of my lucky ukulele on my shoulder. Although it hadn’t been the lucky ukulele at that time, not yet. I hadn’t played it for that long, I’d only had it for a couple of weeks. This was the day it would become the lucky ukulele.
There’d been this weird buzzing in my fingers as I pushed the elevator button to the first floor. I’d written it off immediately as a common side effect of a bad electrical installation. Some of the buildings in the area were old—classy but not really all that comfortable or even safe by modern standards.
The elevator booth collapsed almost immediately. I didn’t have time to yelp, let alone scream. I had the instinct to throw myself to the floor. There was a terrifying groan of metal, an impact that shook me to my core, pain smashing into noise ramming into metal, and then darkness. Death, maybe.
I remembered the darkness perfectly, which upon reflection was rather odd. And then, in the middle of this flawless silence, I’d heard a flawless voice. A masculine voice, deep and soft, unknown yet familiar.
Don’t die, please. I don’t know who or where you are, but I would be very upset if you died on me now.
Voices had always been important to me, and this one, I’d thought then, while deep in darkness, was very nice. Upsetting the voice had felt like a sin. Plus, I’d been really eager now to see the person who was attached to it.
I’d looked for the guy later. I’d thought maybe the voice belonged to one of the firemen who had come to rescue me, to cut and saw me out of the wreckage while I lay there, unable to see. But I had never found the voice again, and I’d forgotten all about it.
And now I was starting to understand why. And why I thought I recognized it.
It was Tristan’s voice.
My eyes flew open.
Holy Larsen.
I could remember it perfectly now, how I’d heard his voice, without any possible doubt. I still didn’t really understand how or why. And I wasn’t sure why he hadn’t remembered me. Because somehow, he’d been there on the day of my accident, and his voice had guided me back out of that darkness.
Talk about a freaking insane light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel story. It was nuts.
But the more I thought about it, the more it felt real. It still didn’t make any sense, but I knew I’d found my grain of sand. My peculiar relationship with Tristan, my abilities to summon him/teleport to him, had to go back to that elevator crash, hadn’t they?
The anomaly I’d been looking for in my past wasn’t anything bad or vile at all. It was the exact opposite. It was pure, blind, unexplainable luck. When I couldn’t find him afterwards, or even remember his voice, it must have left a tiny grain of sadness or of loneliness in me. And this was what Hughes had chosen to dig his hook into.
Something had brought Tristan and me closer. Maybe it was Marianne, maybe it was the forest, maybe it had something to do with Hughes. But it had happened four and a half years ago, not last month. We had a past.
And Hughes had known about this. Which prompted another question: how could he know? Had he been there, too, on the day of the accident? What had really happened that day?
I needed Hughes for answers. Where was he? Now that I’d started remembering, I didn’t want to pass out and die before I knew what was going on exactly.
On an impulse, I shouted, “Hughes, show yourself!”
After all, it had worked when Marianne had called him out in the forest. At first nothing changed, but then there was a slight shift in air pressure in the room, a loud crackling sound, and a smell of sulfur. Suddenly he was there. I still couldn’t see him through the thorns, but I heard him breathe and I sensed his presence. He’d come because I’d called him. Like the other day, from my car.
Wow, I could really call him like that? That could come in handy. Or prompt seriously bad nightmares.
“I hope you didn’t cut yourself on the thorns when I summoned you here,” I said.
Hughes growled.
“I did summon you right now, didn’t I?”
When he didn’t answer, I took that for a confirmation.
“How did you avoid the barbed wire?” I asked.
Maybe Tristan could, too.
“There are a lot of things you don’t know about summoning,” he snapped.
Maybe I’d hit a nerve. I hoped he’d cut himself, just a little. In my imagination, I pictured him with a deep cut on his arm or, better yet, on his cruel traitor’s face.
“I have great news,” I said. “I found the hook! You know, for this thorn spell.”
When he didn’t answer, I kept going.
“Marianne called a protector for her brother when she died. But somehow, you found me too. And I think you cast the death mark on me. But I bet you didn’t know I’d have this funny reaction to it, did you?”
Again, he didn’t grace me with a response, and I kept guessing.
“How did you find me, Hughes? Were you there when Marianne made her last dying wish?”
I laughed then, a truly desperate sounding, pathetic and deranged laugh.
“And when you needed a damsel in distress to pull Tristan into your trap, you chose me, but it was a mistake. Do you know why?”
Silence greeted my words again. I had no proof whatsoever of what I was accusing him of. It was just a hunch, a whole collection of hunches. But the more I spoke, the more confident I felt.
“I’m somehow immune to magic, that’s why! I’m not susceptible to charms, and I have this way of twisting even death marks. Granted, you couldn’t have foreseen that. Hah! Tough luck, Hughes. Maybe next time, don’t underestimate the human girl so much?”
I was provoking him; I knew that. I just needed the energy of rebellion to stay awake and conscious now. The sulfurous smell he’d brought with him had been dispersing slowly, but now it was coming back with a vengeance. I wanted to cover my nose but couldn’t move to escape the stench.
“Dude, you stink.”
It was time to wrap things up.
“I’ve decided to corrupt the spell that links me to Tristan, so that this whole situation becomes moot,” I announced. “I hereby undo what you did to us on May 7th, four years ago. Your magic has no hold on me.”
I just hoped it could work that way. Now that I’d pinned down the problem, could I undo it like that?
Something shifted in the air, and I thought I could feel the thorns retracting, but it might just have been wishful thinking or something Hughes did.
Mostly, I felt relief. And sadness, too. I’d just found out that my weird, rare connection with Tristan was tainted, a fabrication, and I’d renounced it. It had been nice while it had lasted, even if it had been a nasty illusion. I’d felt special and interesting, and even more importantly, I’d felt a bond. Now, giving it up for good was just…depressing. But it was also the wisest thing I could do right now. Because deep down, I’d known it from the start: Tristan wasn’t really for me. He’d just been manipulated, and he’d fallen into a trap: me. Sorting things out was the only thing to do. He had enough people after him, coveting him or his lands. And if we lived, maybe we could still be friends.
Right when I reached that hopeful note, I felt the air pressure around me shifting again.
“True,” Hughes said at last. “And now you’re useless to me.”
There was a crackle and then the suffocating stench of ten thousand lit matches. Brimstone clouded the air, making it unbreathable.
It didn’t take me long to understand what had just happened. Hughes had set the Victory Bar’s cellar on fire.
“Good luck unraveling it all and saving yourself before you burn to death,” he concluded. “Bye-bye now, pet.”
He probably knew he’d lost our battle, but then, I’d lost, too
.
35
This was my first time “unraveling a spell” and probably my last. I had no idea what the heck I was doing, and I found myself trapped in steel. Again. And in flames. Again.
“This has got to stop,” I growled for myself.
The fire was roaring and yowling, hot for my flesh again. The temperature had risen in the space of ten seconds, heating up the cage of thorns around me. Either I was going to suffocate or I would be molten into the metal. I still thought the thorns were retreating, but it was a slow process, and I needed to get out of here right now. And the bar upstairs, full of visitors, was going to burn to the ground. The people having a good time upstairs were in great danger and there was nothing I could do to warn them.
Hughes had disappeared—I’d felt him leave. Whatever he’d done to me when he cast that death mark upon me, I was sure it had affected him, too. And then, what? Had he felt it when I’d called Tristan to me again two weeks ago? Had he lit the house fire to confirm I’d call Tristan for help when in danger?
Who knew?
Focus, Victoire. Untwine this freaking mess. You’re a lucky girl. You can still do it. Do it before it affects Tristan. Just set him free.
In theory, it was easy. I had no claims to the guy. In practice, I felt so responsible for him now that I had a really hard time letting go. Screaming in fear and frustration, I tried my best to think about anything but him. I was so afraid of dragging him into that inferno. But a couple more minutes, and there wasn’t going to be anything left to untangle. The air was burning hot in my lungs and completely devoid of oxygen now.
After the elevator crash, there’d been darkness all around me, but now, all I could see, even with my eyes closed, was searing hot light. I thought the thorns were melting, too. They felt almost pliant now, the blades and spikes not as razor-sharp anymore.
Maybe they, too, suffered from the fire. Or maybe the spell was dying with me. I didn’t dare test it and call Tristan for help. Plus, I’d renounced every right to use that treacherous magical bond between us that Hughes had managed to corrupt and use against us. Trying to escape now using it would be unproductive, wouldn’t it?
Moonlight Binding Magic Page 19
