The Cost of Magic

by S T G Hill

  Ellie clenched her eyes shut, that ball of lead in her stomach turning hot. Images flashed in her mind.

  Images of Belt doing nothing but waving his hand. Images of Brenda and Walt, who also wouldn’t let Belt take her, slumping against each other.

  She had the momentary urge to throw up when she wondered if Belt could do the same thing just as easily to Thorn and Arabella.

  She thought—no, knew—he could.

  And Chauncy wasn’t here to save her again.

  “Ellie, don’t,” Arabella stood up, her eyes clear but those terrible dark webs and tendrils still lingering just beneath her skin.

  “We’re not just going to let you take her!” Thorn said.

  Ellie ignored them for a moment, “And what if I say no?”

  Belt sighed before answering, “Then you come with me as you would anyway, and Master Thrace and Thorn pay for your continued disobedience with their lives. Really, Miss Ashwood, I am quite weary of our little cat-and-mouse hunts. We both know how it will end.”

  Ellie didn’t respond right away. She looked around for something, anything that might catch her eye and give her an idea.

  Or for Arabella or Thorn to seize on some opportunity and whisk the three of them back to safety.

  She saw it, then.

  The chest full of magical artifacts. Reliquaries, phylacteries. She assumed, anyway. The chest promised by Belt to Simon the Polymancer in exchange for handing Ellie over to him.

  It lay with its lid open, sitting just where Simon had dropped it when Thorn’s meteor burned him away to that smear of ash.

  Ellie didn’t let her eyes linger on it. She hoped that the Gem continued hiding her thoughts and feelings from Belt.

  Then Ellie turned and looked at Arabella. “I have to do it.”

  Arabella nearly fell over again. As it was, Ellie’s words rocked her backwards a step.

  Arabella looked to Belt, “Darius, don’t do this. There’s no reason for all of this insanity! She’s just a girl!”

  Belt’s lips tightened into a humorless smile before he responded, “I know that my methods may seem cruel, Arabella. They are cruel. Appalling, even. But in the end it will all be worth it. Not a single life spent in vain, I promise you that. Your sister, she understands.”

  “You’re insane!” Arabella spat.

  That gave Belt pause. He actually frowned and considered her words. “It may appear that way to some. Others, like my fellow Magisters from the Council, know what it is I seek and know that it is for the best. Well, they know what they need to of it.”

  “I wish I’d gotten away from you sooner,” Thorn said, “I wish we’d never met. I wish I’d never heard any of that poison.”

  Belt’s jaw worked when he turned to Thorn, “It wounds me to hear you say that.”

  “Good,” Thorn took a step forward.

  Caspian saw and moved to protect his master, but Belt held up a warning hand.

  “Thorn, don’t do anything!” Ellie said, then, to Arabella, “Nothing. Please.”

  “I spared Caspian,” Arabella directed to Belt, “Spare Ellie for me.”

  Her words twisted in Ellie’s chest.

  “If it were possible, I would. I am not a monster,” Darius Belt said, offering a small smile that on his gaunt face made him appear as a grinning skull.

  “It’ll be fine. Just wait,” Ellie said. “I’ll go with you.”

  Then she started walking towards Belt.

  Ellie did her best to keep her eyes forward, on Belt. He clasped his hands together, apparently pleased with himself and with her.

  “And finally you see reason,” Belt said.

  No, I see a box full of rare and powerful magical junk, Ellie thought. Her eyes kept wanting to flick down to the chest, to peruse its contents.

  But she couldn’t let Belt or Caspian see that. They needed to think that she neither knew nor cared about the chest’s contents.

  They needed to think that the only thing that she wanted was to save her friends.

  Which was, of course, the end goal. Just not the way that Belt thought it would be. And if she could save herself, that wouldn’t be so bad, either.

  Luckily, the opened chest sat pretty close to Ellie’s path. She wouldn’t have to veer off course and give Belt or Caspian those precious moments it took to cast a spell.

  All she needed to do was pick something out that would distract the two of them long enough for the rest of them to make their escape.

  Easiest thing in the world, Ellie thought, suppressing the way her lips wanted to twist into a frustrated smile.

  Once more, she wished that Sybil were here. She would have recognized most of the stuff in the chest, maybe been able to give Ellie some sort of idea which thing to grab for.

  There had been lectures and textbook chapters on old magical artifacts, but nothing that Ellie’s mind could seize on.

  She came closer. Ten steps or so. Then half a dozen.

  The chest’s contents gleamed. Some things glowed. Others, like the crystal ball that looked like it belonged in a psychic’s tent at the carnival, flickered like a faulty bulb.

  Ellie got close enough that if she wanted she could reach out and touch the upturned lid.

  She had to choose fast. If she slowed down, they would see.

  She risked a glance down. Just a quick flick of her eyes, hoping it came off as her watching where she put her feet so that she wouldn’t trip over anything.

  Maybe the Gem helped her choose. Maybe she was just lucky. Either way, something caught her eye and she reached for it.

  Belt’s eyes widened and his thin lips parted. Caspian lunged forward.

  The magical manacle clapped tight around Ellie’s wrist a moment too late. Too late for Belt and Caspian.

  She grabbed hold of the tarnished oil lamp’s handle. The smooth brass felt oddly warm against her palm. Alive, somehow.

  “Stupid girl!” Belt growled.

  “Ellie!” Arabella and Thorn shouted together, seeing the opening that she’d made.

  Arabella forced her magic into twin curved blades that shimmered into life over her hands. Thorn held one arm up above his head and pointed the other towards Caspian.

  Belt’s spell yanked Ellie away from the chest, but she still gripped the lamp.

  Except when she turned it over oil didn’t pour oil. Tenebrous black smoke coiled its way from the spout. More and more of it. It flashed with inner power.

  And, Ellie saw, eyes. Glowing cat’s eyes that peered curiously at her.

  What is this thing?

  The smoke took on the vague outline of a man, the cloud roiling and shifting.

  “WHAT IS YOUR WISH?” the figure asked, apparently oblivious to the magical battle erupting around them.

  “Say nothing!” Belt said, one hand cast out towards her like a claw. “Nothing, girl!”

  It’s a genie. In a bottle. Lamp, I mean, Ellie thought.

  Caspian reached down, his hands glowing hot, and wrenched a chunk of flagstone from the ground. He hurled it at her.

  Thorn channeled lightning. It shot down from the sky into his raised hand and fired from the one he stretched out at Caspian.

  The lightning shattered the flagstone.

  “You shouldn’t’ve done that,” Caspian said, his pretty face darkening.

  “YOUR WISH?” the smoky figure out of the genie asked again.

  In hindsight, Ellie knew she could’ve been far more specific. But present-sight is also near-sighted.

  “Stop Darius Belt,” she told it, glancing towards the angry figure Belt sketched not far away.

  “BELT?” Ellie knew the tone of angry recognition in the genie’s voice.

  She didn’t have time to wonder what Belt had demanded of the genie, or what he’d done to it. Who knew how Darius Belt came by a real genie’s lantern?

  The genie didn’t so much turn around as rearrange itself so that it faced Belt.

  The magical manacle disappeared from Ellie�
��s wrist, dissolving to the broken flagstones in a shower of sparks.

  “Do not get between me and the girl,” Belt told the entity, “You know the punishment that awaits you for defying me.”

  “BELT…” when the genie growled the ruins trembled around them. Two of the ancient columns fell over, kicking up dust.

  “Stop,” Belt warned it once more.

  The ashen cloud of the genie vanished and reappeared directly in front of Belt, whose eyes widened in sudden shock.

  Before he could respond with a spell of his own, the genie grabbed him by the neck and lifted him off the ground.

  “BELT!” it bellowed again, once more shaking the very earth with the rawness of its anger.

  Belt grabbed the shadowy smoke of the genie’s head, his fists glowing hot. Crackles of red lightning shot through the genie’s body and its shriek of pain cut straight into Ellie’s mind.

  She collapsed to her knees, hands clapped to her ears.

  Arabella, Thorn, and Caspian did the same.

  “While he’s distracted!” Arabella gritted her teeth against the sharp keen of the genie and reached for Ellie.

  Thorn recovered faster than Caspian, and he rushed him with a body check that belonged more on a football field than a sorcerers’ duel.

  The genie’s cry changed. A vortex of sand and dust whipped up in a dirty tornado around Belt and his adversary.

  Flashes of brilliant blues and hot reds were all Ellie could make out of their struggle.

  Caspian and Thorn rolled across the broken flagstones, grappling. Caspian barely managed to get his head out of the way of a column of fire that Thorn shot at him.

  Thorn caught a glowing fist to the side of the head and the two rolled away from each other.

  Arabella and Ellie both reached for him.

  “We have to get out of here!” Arabella implored.

  Thorn, dazed, pushed himself up on one knee. He shook his head and came out of whatever rage had driven him to attack so recklessly.

  “We don’t have much time!” Arabella said, already calling up a transphere.

  Thorn snarled at the effort it took to gain his feet. He stumbled a few steps towards them.

  Ellie stretched for him while trying to shield her eyes from the stinging dust that whipped through the air.

  Their fingers almost touched.

  “Thorn!” Ellie shouted over the gale. It felt like the wind ripped her voice away so that she barely heard herself.

  Why did he stop reaching?

  She saw a heartbeat later.

  Caspian, his entire body covered in a sheath of crackling magic, charged at him.

  Thorn slowed him just enough with a quickly created series of shimmering barriers that when Caspian collided with him the impact didn’t break every bone in his body.

  The swirling vortex of air around Belt and the genie changed and slowed.

  The angry shouts and wails of the genie also changed. They became panicked and pained.

  “It’s losing,” Arabella said, one hand gripped tight to Ellie’s shoulder so that Ellie couldn’t rush to Thorn, “We have to get out of here.”

  The bubble of the transphere started closing around then, dulling the titanic whoosh of the wind.

  “We can’t leave Thorn!” Ellie said.

  As though Thorn heard her, he blasted Caspian away and struggled back up to his feet. Before he made it two steps Caspian grabbed him from behind, pinning his arms behind his back and forcing him down to his knees.

  With the bubble closing the roar of the vortex Ellie couldn’t hear what Thorn said when he looked up at her.

  She didn’t need to. She could see it in his eyes and read it on his lips easily enough.

  “Get out of here.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Arabella breathed behind her. The transphere lifted from the ground.

  “We can’t just leave him!” Ellie struggled hard against Arabella’s grip.

  But unlike their fake fight to impress Simon, Arabella didn’t just play at holding her back.

  And for a moment, even Arabella hesitated.

  Then the vortex of dust and stone surrounding Belt and the genie calmed and they saw it. They saw how Belt had wrapped the smoky body of the genie in a spring-like coil of power.

  He had almost won.

  “We can’t stay any longer,” Arabella said through a voice thick with anger.

  “Don’t go!” Ellie said.

  They shot away into the sky.

  Chapter 43

  Ellie drew into herself on the journey back to Brooklyn.

  “Simon didn’t know where we came from, only where we wanted to meet. The warding is still in place. We’ll be safe with Grant and Peter, for now, anyway,” Arabella said.

  They shot with amazing speed high above the land, which was lush green jungle for a while. Ellie didn’t care.

  She didn’t respond, either.

  She sat on the floor of the transphere with her knees pulled tight against her chest. She couldn’t get her last sight of Thorn out of her mind, which filled the image with terrible detail.

  Thorn on his knees, at Caspian’s mercy. A sneer of rage twisted Caspian’s too-pretty face.

  Regret and defeat mingled on Thorn’s features. His cheeks had gone gray with dust, which was streaked with red from the many little cuts that the sharp fragments and particles had cut into him.

  She’d never seen that look before from him. Not even after the Minotaur at the end of the Trial had smashed him with the flat of its ax blade.

  She saw the way his shoulders slumped. The realization in his eyes that this had been their last, best hope and that it was all for nothing.

  Ellie wondered if Simon even possessed fragments of unicorn horn or if their whole plan had been totally in vain from the start.

  And now Belt has him. Him and any of the others left alive from the attack in London.

  Ellie didn’t know how much time passed. Time was a funny thing when you were stuck in your own head.

  Although, to be fair, Ellie wasn’t the only thing stuck in her own head.

  But despite everything that had just happened, the Gem seemed silent. A reticent shadow at the back of her thoughts.

  Arabella set them down on the roof to the Pitarelli brownstone. Some rain had collected in little puddles on the flat roof and when the transphere disappeared Ellie could smell the cool dampness that was the only sign of the storm that had passed by.

  She barely registered that it was still light out. That the sun tried in vain to burn through a translucent sheet of cloud that rendered the sky dull, flat, and colorless.

  “Ellie…” Arabella laid her hand on Ellie’s shoulder.

  Ellie jerked away. “You left him.”

  Arabella’s shoulders slumped. Dust from the battle darkened the red of her trench coat and turned her black hair a dusty gray.

  The dust muted everything about her but her eyes. They filled with pain when they beheld Ellie’s unrestrained anger.

  Ellie hated that she hurt Arabella like that. And part of her knew that she was wrong.

  If they’d tried to save Thorn they likely would’ve been captured as well. Belt had just about finished with the genie, and would’ve turned his attention to them next.

  She knew that, rationally, but couldn’t acknowledge it.

  “Ellie…” Arabella started.

  “You left him!”

  The genie. What did Belt do to the genie? Ellie caught herself wondering. Hurt it, at the very least, she knew.

  Because I asked it—wished it—to stop him.

  “Thorn wanted us to go. I didn’t want to leave him, either,” Arabella came closer, and Ellie saw the strain in her normally warm and caring eyes. Saw and knew that Arabella herself had about reached her own breaking point.

  “But you did,” Ellie said, “You left him and now Belt’s got him and who knows what he’ll do to him?”

  He’ll kill him, a terrible voice whispered in
Ellie’s mind, He’ll wave his hand like he’s brushing away a cobweb only the cobweb is Thorn’s life and he’ll be dead – dead just like Walt and Brenda. Dead dead dead.

  “I know,” Arabella said.

  Then she hugged Ellie.

  Ellie tensed up. Then she pushed away. Arabella hugged her again. Ellie pounded her fists against her, but Arabella didn’t let go.

  She didn’t let go when Ellie’s fists unclenched. And she didn’t let go when Ellie wrapped her hands around Arabella’s waist and hugged her as tight as she could.

  They stayed that way until the roof access door opened.

  Grant peered out of the darkness within, his service pistol held at a low ready so that its muzzle pointed at the roof.

  “Let me by!” Peter said from behind him.

  Grant held his son back with one hand, peering out around the roof to make certain that no one waited to ambush them.

  “You guys are back!” Peter said, in his excitement perhaps mistaking Ellie and Arabella’s hug for one of joy. “Did you get what you needed?”

  Grant, trained to read people from a distance, recognized their true feelings. “Peter…”

  “Hey, guys?” Peter said.

  Ellie and Arabella let each other go reluctantly, and Peter saw their ashen, dusty faces, their torn clothes, the way they both just stared off into the middle distance.

  Then he noticed the absence. “Where’s Thorn?”

  Matilda came up the stairs at that moment and emerged onto the roof. “Did you get the horn? Why isn’t Thorn with you?”

  Chapter 44

  “Is he dead?” Matilda said, “Did you see it happen?”

  They had gone down to the Pitarelli basement, some instinct driving them all down to the safety of underground.

  Arabella had even checked the warding and insisted it still held. But even she had come down after them with little fuss.

  Grant tried to give them space, tried to get Peter to give them space as well but couldn’t keep the boy from going downstairs with them