The Cost of Magic

by S T G Hill

  “You should have heeded that small voice within you,” Belt replied.

  He didn’t want to tarry any longer. Couldn’t. He could feel his body weakening. Feel the rapid and unforgiving aging already cutting deep lines into his forehead, loosening the skin on his jaw and cheeks.

  He made a shoving motion at the bus. It flipped over onto its side, windows shattering, people screaming.

  Then Belt gathered a handful of the tour guide’s shirt and lifted him from his feet. “No disturbances.”

  “Okay, okay, fine, please, just don’t…”

  Belt set him down before he could finish his pleading and continued on.

  The guides were quick, to their credit. They shifted all the tourists back to their shiny, modern information center.

  When Belt finally stood in the very center of that ancient henge of standing stones he felt it. The converging of all those leylines, directly beneath his feet.

  They pulsed with atavistic power. Pulsed so that it pounded in his bones and behind his eyes.

  He placed his hands flat on the central monolith, which lay on its side.

  It was dangerous to draw power directly from the leylines. Dangerous for normal sorcerers, at least.

  Even in their degraded state, they contained energy and force incalculable to most minds.

  Belt was not most sorcerers, nor most minds. Still it was dangerous.

  But necessary.

  And Darius Belt never flagged from doing what was necessary.

  This ancient place, referred to as Stonehenge by modern humanity, was far more ancient than anyone had yet proposed.

  Belt knew this. It amused him to watch the people of the world attempt to divine things beyond their comprehension. Things like the henge.

  Yes, it was far more ancient than anyone guessed or speculated. And its true purpose had also remained a mystery.

  A mystery to everyone but Darius Belt.

  The henge’s true purpose, secondary even to the convergence of leylines in the bones of the world beneath it, was far stranger than anyone knew or theorized.

  There were many mysterious things lost to the obscuring mists of history. Events, people, places. Truths. Truths and facts the knowledge of which was locked away only in the mind of Darius Belt.

  “Good,” Belt breathed when the first tendrils of power reached up through the central stone and into his waiting hands.

  It burned in his veins. Real pain, nothing like what his body experienced beneath the rubble of London, coursed through him.

  It also refilled him.

  While the tourists and their guides now knew to stay away, the nil military, the Royal Air Force, maintained a training base nearby.

  It didn’t take long before their massive helicopters, the fastest way to the site from the base, converged on Stonehenge, the rotors of the craft whipped the air down onto the grass.

  “Lay down your weapons and get on the ground!” a commanding voice boomed from a megaphone mounted on one of the helicopters ordered.

  With what had just happened in London, the military wasn’t taking any chances.

  Nils were nothing to Belt. Annoyances, at best. He couldn’t move his hands to cast a spell that would send their steel birds tumbling to the earth.

  But he could invade their minds. And he did.

  The craft turned their sides to him so they could open big doors that revealed equally large guns, all directed at him.

  They fired. Bullets hammered through the air. The report of their guns echoed over this ancient place.

  Every last projectile met its end, disintegrating to nothing as they slammed against a shimmering barrier that sprung into being around the standing megaliths.

  This will go faster without such distractions, Belt knew.

  He took over the minds of the men behind the controls of the whirling contraptions. He saw through all of their eyes simultaneously.

  Saw the shock in their comrades’ faces when they pulled the pistols from their holsters. Heard their shouts when they began firing.

  One helicopter flew out of control, its large gun raking the side of its nearest comrade as it did.

  Soon, they all crashed to the ground, making new tombs amongst the bulging grave barrows that dotted the area.

  Belt reached out once more with his mind, not into physical space, but into the future. He saw that he would now have enough time to finish this process in peace.

  Chapter 34

  “So… you’re a wizard or something?” Peter said.

  Ellie smiled. “No. Not a witch or a wizard. A sorcerer.”

  They sat on the front steps of Peter’s brownstone. Well, his father’s brownstone. Back in Brooklyn.

  Ellie couldn’t stop listening to the familiar sounds of traffic, smelling the familiar (if often unpleasant) smells of the place.

  Somewhere safe, she remembered thinking. The Gem seemed to have seized on the first place, or perhaps the first person, in her thoughts that made Ellie feel safe.

  “There’s a difference?” Peter asked, incredulous.

  He’d taken the cadre of sorcerers popping into existence in his den pretty well. The only problem at hand was the explaining of sorcerous nomenclature.

  “Of course there is!” Ellie couldn’t keep herself from smiling. Everything, all the troubles she faced, seemed so very far away at that moment.

  “I can’t really see why there is,” Peter replied.

  Ellie thought back to her first days at Sourcewell. She’d asked a similar question of Thorn.

  “Witches and wizards and magicians are all fakes,” Ellie told him, “They perform on the stage, they’re characters in movies. In real life, there’s only sorcerers. Because there’s only one magic, though it moves through every person a little differently.”

  “Still not very convincing…” Peter said, “But I’m glad that you’re back.”

  Then he put his hand over hers, his palm warm, and just a little sweaty, against her knuckles.

  It was her left hand, the one with the missing pinky-fingertip.

  All at once, Ellie’s heart started to pound, and she pulled back from him.

  Peter, already nervous, shifted back against the railing. “Sorry. I just thought…”

  “No, it’s okay,” Ellie felt suddenly angry with herself, “It’s just that so much has happened. My brain just can’t get around it all. So I don’t think it’s a good time for… you know.”

  They both went quiet, neither quite willing to say out loud that they liked each other as more than friends.

  But Peter, the true cop’s son, drove straight to the real issue at hand, “So, when are you going to tell me the full story?”

  Ellie frowned, “What do you mean? I already told you that magic’s real, that there’s sorcerers sitting around your kitchen table right now.”

  He raised an eyebrow at her, “That’s just part of it. Ellie, you gotta see things from my perspective. One day you meet up with some strange guy you’re awful cagey about. That night, it looks like someone set off a bomb on your street. Your foster parents, they’re…”

  He glanced nervously at Ellie and then away.

  Ellie’s stomach churned, and she wanted to let it go at that, to leave that unspoken as well.

  But I’m tired of being helpless, remember?

  And she felt strongly that fully facing the facts was part of being not helpless. It wasn’t lost on her that, had she faced the facts as Thorn laid them out to her that fateful day, the Williamsons might still be alive.

  “They’re dead,” Ellie said, just the sound of the word like a punch in the stomach.

  “Because of this Belt guy,” Peter replied, “The one who’s also head of Panopsys? Still can’t get my head around that. His name’s not even ‘Belt.’”

  “It’s a disguise name. Belt killed them,” Ellie replied. Because of me, she added silently.

  “Yeah, they’re gone. And so are you. Not a word from you. For over a week! Then next
thing I know you’re in my den just after some freak storm just about flattens London.”

  “Also Belt,” Ellie put in.

  They’d been at the Pitarelli household for the second day now, and of course there was only a single story on the news. It didn’t matter where you looked: the net, the papers tossed on the steps, the TV, the radio.

  At that moment, Peter’s dad, Officer Grant, had the TV playing in the den. And with the front door open a crack, they could both hear it clearly.

  “…second day of what’s been coined the London Cataclysm. Still well over a hundred thousand souls missing, with what some experts are speculating as hundreds of billions of dollars in damages.

  “World financial markets continue their freefall in their worst collapse since the Great Depression. The Royal Family has returned from their vacation to survey the damage personally. Stay tuned for live updates.

  “While meteorologists are unable to explain the sudden powerful storm, many are asking if this is the first of such sudden devastating weather brought on by climate change. Still others continue to ask if there is a connection between events that transpired over the city moments before the storm began, citing strange footage taken by dozens of onlookers at the Imperial War Museum.

  “In other news, the Royal Air Force has continued to deny that another disturbance has occurred at the Stonehenge UNESCO World Heritage Site, stating only that they closed the area to conduct a wargaming exercise…”

  Both Peter and Ellie had quieted to listen for any updates. Still nothing new, although Ellie wished they’d talk more about the Stonehenge thing.

  Something about that felt wrong. Ominous.

  “That museum thing’s already gone viral,” Peter pulled out his phone and brought up rather shaky footage.

  Ellie experienced a strange feeling of disembodiment, watching herself standing there as a giant battleship cannon swung towards her.

  Master Shaffir had frozen everyone in place, true, but in the heat of the moment he’d failed to extend the enchantment to the camera phones many of the bystanders already had out.

  “It’s like this in all of them?” Ellie said, frowning down at the tiny phone. She grabbed Peter’s hands and pulled the screen closer to her face.

  “Yeah, all the, uh, sorcerers, are blurry. No one can say why,” he said.

  She squinted at the screen, pausing it with a touch of her finger when a blurry blob she thought was Thorn, judging by the blue color of the smear, appeared center frame.

  “Huh,” she said.

  Then they both noticed their hands touching. This time, they didn’t pull away. Peter kept glancing at her and then looking away, swallowing nervously.

  Ellie’s heart pounded once more.

  She did feel safe around Peter. And despite everything, whenever he looked at her his eyes weren’t full of judgment.

  Everyone else seemed to look at her with some sort of judgment. Even, she thought, Arabella. Who tried to hide it and nearly did.

  But Ellie was used to being judged. Used to foster families and guardians wearing smiles that never touched their eyes.

  She knew it when she saw it. And she couldn’t blame them.

  Then Peter managed to look at her without looking away, and a tingle of excitement ran up the front of Ellie’s stomach.

  She’d never been kissed before. Never so much as held hands with a guy.

  And now she was holding hands, and she didn’t need any preternatural powers of prediction to see that Peter wanted to kiss her.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” Peter said, so quietly she barely heard it over the sound of a passing delivery van.

  She didn’t say anything. She didn’t think she could.

  Then Peter leaned in, just a little. When he saw her lean in as well, that emboldened him and he moved faster.

  Ellie started closing her eyes. It felt like her heart wanted to jump out of her throat.

  “So this is why you brought us here? To suck face?”

  Ellie and Peter jerked as though they’d grabbed a live wire. They scooted away from each other, both of them backing up against their respective railings. The wrought iron spindle pushed against Ellie’s spine.

  Matilda had snuck up on them sometime in the last minute or two. She leaned against the doorframe with her arms crossed.

  She’d given herself a different outfit. When they awoke that morning rather than hitting the shower, she’d gone over to the full-length mirror in front of the main hall closet and just waved her hand down and then up.

  Her hair had bounced back all blonde and pretty and smelling freshly shampooed. Her wrinkly blue trench coat turned into a pair of jeans and a blouse.

  Peter’s jaw had dropped, as had Grant, who had been worrying out loud about finding them all fresh clothes.

  Ellie had just felt jealous; even when she had her magic she hadn’t mastered that spell. Arabella did it for her that morning.

  “I wouldn’t go around accusing people of sucking face at the wrong moment,” Ellie warned her, suppressing her gag reflex at the memory of her pulling Thorn in for a kiss.

  Peter once more couldn’t look at either of them. He blushed so bright his ears looked like a pair of Christmas lights.

  “Your jealousy is adorable, ab,” Matilda said.

  Though twin spots of color did blossom in Matilda’s cheeks. That made Ellie happy. She wanted to get under Matilda’s skin.

  “Why did you come out, anyway?” Ellie said, angry at her moment with Peter getting so rudely yanked away from her.

  Matilda tossed her hair back off her shoulder with an impudent shake of her head. “To tell you two to get back inside before someone sees you who shouldn’t.”

  Ellie hated having to look upwards at Matilda, so she pulled herself up to her feet and took the two steps up to the main landing.

  Matilda still stood taller, but the difference wasn’t so drastic anymore.

  “Arabella put up the warding herself. No one’s going to find us here,” Ellie said.

  Arabella had said as much in their hurried preparations the day before. Officer Grant, ever the dutiful officer, wanted to bring them all down to the precinct. For their own protection.

  Matilda had wanted to charm him over to their way of thinking with a spell. Arabella had taken control and led Grant into the kitchen, where they spoke for a while until they came to an agreement.

  Ellie didn’t know if that agreement had anything to do with Arabella putting her hand over Grant’s while they sat at the kitchen table or not.

  But in any case they had both emerged and Grant told them they could lay low at his place for a few days while they figured out what to do next.

  After convincing Grant, Arabella went outside and knelt down on the front stoop. The entire brownstone glowed a cherry red, the color of dying embers, and then stopped.

  “That will keep prying eyes away from us for now, magical or not,” Arabella told them when she came back inside.

  Retelling all this to Matilda didn’t much impress her. She twisted her lip up in a sneer.

  “Look, I know you weren’t the best at studying or learning things, so I’ll remind you: obscurement charms work best when there’s no reason to suspect them at all. If you know they’re there, it’s pretty easy to see through them. Get it?”

  Ellie’s irritation flashed hotter. She wanted to snap back at Matilda, but knew that she was right.

  Caspian had seen through the disguising charm Cassiodorian had laid over her at Sourcewell as soon as he knew where to look.

  She glanced at Peter, her irritation softening when she saw him. They’d come so close.

  Peter saw her look. He smiled and turned his attention down the sidewalk to where a woman followed a couple of comically tiny dogs on leashes.

  “So is there an actual reason you came out here?” Ellie said.

  “Yeah. She wants to talk to you. Thrace, I mean,” the color in Matilda’s cheeks returned to its normal pale shade. />
  “Master Thrace, you mean,” Ellie told her.

  Matilda made a show of looking up and down the street. “We’re not at Sourcewell anymore, are we? Actually, I’ll bet we won’t see it for a long, long time. So tell me, what’s she the master of, again?”

  “That’s a dumb way of looking at things and you know it,” Ellie said. She could feel Matilda’s words worming their way under her skin.

  Which was right where Matilda wanted them, of course. Ellie knew it. She just couldn’t do anything about it.

  “Whatever,” Matilda said, “She just asked me to come find you and tell you to come see her. I’m sure that whatever she has to say is less important than the world’s most awkward kiss with your nil boyfriend.”

  She could practically feel the heat radiating from Peter’s blush. “You mean the nil who’s letting us hide in his house so we don’t have to keep running?”

  “Yeah, that one,” Matilda started to turn and go back into the house.

  “Wait. What did Arabella say she wanted to talk about?”

  Matilda stopped and looked back at Ellie over her shoulder, “How should I know? I’m not the Omenborn so I guess I’m not important enough to tell.”

  That’s what she’s really upset about, Ellie realized. She didn’t do anything about it, however.

  Let her feel that way. It’s the least she deserves, Ellie thought. She realized that wasn’t okay, either. But the irritation in her chest and stomach didn’t let her say anything else.

  Besides, after Arabella gave Ellie a magical scrub down and change of clothes she’d kept her distance. Ellie couldn’t really blame her.

  Matilda didn’t wait. “She’s in the cop’s study.” Then she disappeared into the shadows of the front hall.

  Peter climbed up the stairs and stood beside Ellie, looking into the brownstone. “Barrel of laughs, that one.”

  “Try being her roommate,” Ellie said.

  “You’re kidding,” Peter gave her a sympathetic glance.

  “Nope.”

  She wondered what Arabella wanted to talk about. She wondered if she could say anything to Arabella to make everything all better between them.

  Darius Belt was wrong about something, Ellie knew. There was more magic couldn’t do than bring back the dead or travel in time.