The Waking Magic (Winter's Blight Book 3)

by M. C. Aquila

  “Cecil,” she called to her brother ahead of her, who was struggling to lift his knee high enough to climb over a fallen tree in his path. “You are not still cross with Mother, are you?”

  Instead of answering her question, Cecil twisted around and gestured to his outfit, griping, “Honestly, how mortals wear their trousers this tight, I shall never know. Capes went out of fashion for this? They must seldom have occasion to move.”

  Vera giggled into her hand. They were both playing a fun game of dress-up today to fit in with the humans at the festival, Cecil in his black skinny jeans and a T-shirt and her in a white peasant blouse and skirt that were hemmed so short her belly and legs were numb from cold, her fiddle in a case strapped to her back. It made her wonder if modern humans had any knowledge of the seasons.

  With a wink of one of his golden eyes, Cecil flexed his hand, and dark, sharp claws flashed from the tips of his fingers; he slashed the fabric of his trouser legs at the knees. “Ah,” he said, testing the improvement of the design by bending his legs. “Right as rain!”

  “I believe that some trousers are sold pre-ripped, Brother.”

  “Are they, truly? Well, that would have saved me some time.” Cecil sneered and added, “When I saw your favorite creature last evening, he seemed to dislike my fashion as well.”

  Vera beamed. “Oh, Alan is such a funny creature, isn’t he?”

  “If he uses the crystal I gifted him last night, he may not be the same creature as before.”

  Vera’s jaw went slack. “Does the Winter King know what you’ve done?”

  Barking a laugh, Cecil threw his hands into the air and said, “Darling, the Winter King doesn’t even know I created that little crystal! It’s a secret. You like secrets, remember?”

  She mused, “I’m interested to see the effects of the crystal. Do you think I could be there when he uses it?”

  “Darling,” Cecil said, tutting at her, “you will be long gone when the Iron Guard arrives. I don’t want you anywhere near that massacre.”

  As they walked on and Vera looked up at the dark green firs and pines that thickly perfumed the air, accented with oaks and their yellow leaves, she asked again, “If you saw Mother again, would you be cross?”

  “Why ever would I be cross, Vera?” Cecil’s voice was coated with sarcasm. “She only attempted to murder me with a letter opener. The worst part was that she ruined my favorite shirt; they do not make shirts like they did in the eighteenth century anymore!”

  Vera bit her lip. “You won’t try to kill her, will you?”

  “I am not feeling very beastly today. I’m feeling more like a warm, snuggly kitten.” Cecil sighed. “As long as she doesn’t get in the way of our collecting James, I should stay snuggly.”

  After he said their little brother’s name, Vera met Cecil’s eyes in the silence that followed. His throat bobbed as he swallowed hard.

  Vera reached one hand behind her back for her fiddle and said, “A tune would loosen your lips. Shall I pluck out a song to poke at your dark, hidden thoughts, or will you simply tell me instead?”

  “No magic is required.” Cecil laughed unsteadily. “Gods, I am nervous, Vera. I have not felt this way in… so long. Everything must go perfectly.”

  She knew he was thinking of his brother by blood, who was lost a century before Vera was born. He told her of that little boy once, still a toddler when his life was taken from him. He told her of a little boy who had often slept nestled against the resting Beast with his fingers curled in the dark fur as if it was nothing more than a kitten, unafraid.

  “Will James be afraid?” Vera asked.

  She had heard James described by the thrall who investigated when the boy had broken the Master’s seal by speaking his name; she still pictured him as that little boy in Mother’s photograph with flour in his hair and a goofy smile on his face.

  “Perhaps.”

  Cecil went quiet; Vera leaped over a fallen branch. Faint sounds of the Wayfaring Festival floated through the forest: instruments being tuned, tinny radio music playing, the chatter of hundreds of festivalgoers trickling in.

  Eventually Cecil asked her, “Were you afraid when I found you?”

  “A little, teeny bit,” she admitted, pinching her thumb and forefinger together. “However, that changed the moment you called me your family.”

  Before he came along, there was only sorrow… sometimes ribbons and dolls and little songs… but mostly sorrow.

  The English ministers had no idea what to do with an orphaned Polish girl—the girl who sang foreign songs, danced, and plucked out tunes on her tiny fiddle that made men go mad or fall into a trance. She giggled as her funny playthings fell and writhed at her songs. Devil, they had called her. A demon’s daughter.

  Her father had not been a demon but a Water spirit from somewhere in the Baltic Sea. He had seduced her mother with a song from his fiddle, and together they had produced little Vera, a girl who not quite mortal.

  The ministers kept her away from the other children and would come poke her and flick holy water into her eyes, which grew tiresome. That was when they had deferred to a scientist of sorts: the renowned researcher Cecil Morris.

  “Your eyes weren’t fully gold then, Brother.” Vera hummed to herself as they walked along, lost in the melody of memory. “They were bluish gold, like sand under shallow waves.”

  “I did not shift as often then as I do now, darling. The eyes of the Beast weren’t fully mine yet.”

  “And you were wearing a long coat like a doctor’s, though it was a royal purple. But you weren’t a doctor.”

  Cecil had been the richest-looking and most well-dressed and groomed man she’d ever seen. He had crouched before her and looked her in the eyes as no one else had.

  When Vera had asked if he were there to fix her, he replied, “There is nothing to fix. I want to hear you play. Show me what you can really do and do not hold back.”

  She had played her fiddle for him, but he wasn’t as affected by it as the other men were. Then, when she had finished, he held out his hand to her and said, “I can take you from this place and show you things you’ve never dreamed of. But if you take my hand, you agree to give yourself to me fully, to stay by my side forever.”

  Of course she hadn’t really known what he meant. All she could think to ask was, “May I bring my dolls?”

  “You will have all the dolls your heart desires, darling.”

  So she had taken his offer, his clean and smooth hand enveloping her small and callused one. He had taken her to his estate, where his thralls tended to her, and later to his business in the industrial smog of the city, which was booming then. His study there was adorned with pinned wings, horns, and hooves of every kind of faery. Vera loved to play there and talk to the bird faeries he kept in jars; Seelies were fed Unseelie fruit and blood to turn them. She liked to watch her creatures change into something new.

  At first she was afraid that she would end up like one of his projects under the lens of his magnifying glass. But that fear had passed when he began to call her his sister. Unlike how he compelled his other thralls, Cecil had promised to never suppress her will with his magic. He was family.

  And now our family shall be completed at last!

  Vera did a little skip. “What adventures we shall have with our new brother! What shall you teach him first? How to shift as you do? Should we dance in the full moon’s light or by the roaring flame of a bonfire?”

  When Cecil leveled a hard, solid gold stare at her, she listened as he warned, “Remember what I’ve told you before. We mustn’t frighten him away. You ought to be a good girl and keep our family a little secret for now, oughtn’t you?”

  “Yes, Brother.” She mimed sewing her lips shut with a needle and tossing it into the forest, and they continued on their way to the festival grounds.

  When they arrived, emerging from the forest like shadows into the fairgrounds, they settled in with a crowd at the edge of the woods. Tinny mu
sic was coming from a radio playing in the middle of the clearing, around which were gathered the strangest mortals Vera had ever seen: they were dressed in garishly bright and frilly clothing, glitter and powder smeared on their skin, fake wings and horns and flowers adorning their bodies as if they were playing dress-up as how they imagined faeries looked.

  There were around ten of them; some were dancing to the music while others were sitting in the shade of an oak and pointing up at the rolling rain clouds. A couple was lying in the grass, dead to the world, heavy-lidded, surrounded by fruit half-eaten on the ground.

  Vera wrinkled her nose at the familiar scent of faery fruit.

  “Vera,” Cecil said. “I’m going ahead to keep a keen eye out for our boy.”

  “Oh!” She brightened. “Shall I come?”

  “Why don’t you practice your fiddling first, darling? Although we are mainly here for James, you have a performance later on, and it’s your big day too.”

  Vera beamed. Then, as she heard more rustling behind her, she chanced a glance over her shoulder into the forest.

  You won’t try to find James first, will you, Mother? Vera pleaded in her mind. You’ll stay away, won’t you? You should stay away, or Cecil might tear you apart.

  Cecil headed to the middle of the festival grounds, just out of the shade of the trees, away from the woods. Vera watched him leave up the steep incline, thinking that today would be a wonderful day indeed.

  She was practicing her scales when a strange sound came from the woods. At first she squinted at her fiddle and played a few chords, thinking that the screeching was coming from her playing.

  “Oh dear,” she murmured. “This bow sounds like a dying—”

  Then a long-haired black cat with gray streaks, covered in leaves and briars, burst out of the foliage, keeping up a constant stream of yowling. It was as if the cat were trying to talk like a human.

  “Hello, Mother.” Vera lowered her bow and fiddle. “I am glad to see you alive and well, but you should leave before my brother sees you. You understand, don’t you?”

  It took Vera a moment to realize that the cat could not answer her. With a few words sung under her breath, the curse was lifted and before her eyes, Kallista appeared.

  Rather, she appeared for a split second, noticed her nakedness, screamed, and threw herself behind a tree. After letting out a few choice foreign words, Kallista managed, “I am… I am completely indecent! Vera, bring me something to wear right now. I have to find my sons.”

  Vera picked up her bow and fiddle from the ground and continued practicing. “I cannot do that, Mother. It’s best that you stay away.”

  “You wretched girl.” Though Vera could not see her, she distinctly heard Kallista stamp her foot on the ground. “My son is in danger. I need to go to him!”

  “James isn’t in danger. The Master would never harm him.”

  Kallista let out a shuddering breath. When she peered around the tree, her arms were wrapped around herself, her long hair flowing over her shoulders and torso. Her brown eyes were pleading and desperate.

  “If you think that,” she said, “you’re more foolish than I thought. He will hurt him, Vera. Evil things cannot do anything else.”

  “You’re wrong, Mother.”

  “Vera—!” Kallista shouted. “Oh, damn all magic!”

  But Vera was already walking away, her frown fading as she struck a tune on the violin as she left Kallista behind, drowning out the woman’s yelling with her music.

  Chapter Eleven

  As they drew nearer to the festival grounds, more vehicles passed them; they walked on the side in the grass by the trees. While he walked, James found himself adjusting his scarf, unable to keep his mind off finding Delphina, finding Mum. To distract himself, he produced his Unseelie book from his bag and began to read through it.

  With a book in his hands, James felt safe. He ran his thumb over the worn and ragged cover and over the author’s name that had long since faded from sight. As he turned the pages, he lingered on the Red Cap page, shuddering.

  “Oh, look,” a gruff voice said. “There’s the bookworm I’ve been hearing about.” There was the shuffling of gravel under boots, and Cai appeared beside him.

  James walked faster, figuring the man just wanted to tease him or threaten him further. He was distinctly reminded of dealing with a younger Boyd at their house.

  But Cai kept pace. He peered at the book over his shoulder and asked, “Is there anything in that book of yours about the faery that’s marked you?”

  James shrugged. “There was. But someone tore it out.”

  “Who? Some superstitious nutter?”

  “I dunno,” James lied. “Maybe.”

  There was a lull in the conversation, and he thought that Cai might leave him alone. But he didn’t leave, and he was squinting at the book with interest.

  Why does he even care? It’s not like he’d help anyway even if Iain didn’t have to bribe him with that stupid amulet.

  “So,” Cai said, “you don’t know a thing about the faery who made the deal? No wonder you were badgering me for information.”

  “Actually, we did figure something out. We know it’s a faery cat.”

  “They’re a pain in the arse.” Cai ran a hand over his face. “Which one is it?”

  “I’m, uh, not sure yet.” James could no longer pretend he wasn’t interested, the pitch of his voice rising as he asked, “Have you met any?”

  “I’ve slain a few when they wouldn’t leave me be.” Cai chuckled darkly. “But you have no clues as to which one it is?”

  “Well, it lives on the moors.”

  The man’s face fell a bit as his brows pulled together. “The ones I’ve run into have been up north or in the forests. Must be one I’ve never met.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Cai bent his head until he was looking James in the eye. “What’s your plan then? How are you going to find out more about this beast?”

  James gestured to the path ahead of them. “Once I find my mum’s sister, I’ll have more information. My mum went to her to, um, find out what the faery was. That’s why we’re here.”

  The next words Cai spoke were uttered slowly, carefully, as if he were avoiding saying something directly. “And if your mum couldn’t… permanently end the deal, what’s your plan then? What if this thing is more powerful than you expect?”

  James had seen that same look on Cai’s face before on the faces of others. It was a look full of doubt—doubt in him. Cai thought he couldn’t take care of himself, that he would fail, and that he was in over his head. But that only made him more determined to prove everyone wrong.

  A faint smile tugged at his mouth; James straightened his posture, suddenly feeling taller than he was, and said, “It’s simple. I’ll find its weakness and exploit it.”

  Cai’s eyebrows rose. “You’ve done this before with monsters? Have you and your brother fought many Unseelies and won?”

  “You heard about the Unseelie dwarf my brother killed,” James replied. “I’m the one who told him to behead it. And anyway, I was thinking of an idea to defeat the Red Cap before you came in. So yeah, I’ve got some experience.”

  Cai scoffed and folded his arms in a very Iain way. “What if this thing has no weakness—at least not one you or your brother could exploit? What if it is beyond your power even if you do know all there is to know about it? What then?”

  Why is he asking? It isn’t any of his business anyway. What does he want to hear—that I can’t do it, that it’s hopeless? It’s not like he’d do it himself.

  James jerked his chin up, glaring at the path ahead. “We’ll just have to figure something out ourselves. We always do.”

  With that, he slammed the book shut and tucked it under his arm.

  A sound clinked through the air like wind chimes, musical and light, loud enough to hear over his squeaking shoes. James looked up at the trees. The sound was coming from them, and his spirits brightened so
mewhat at the thought that there might be a faery creature.

  That was when he saw the silver bells swaying in the branches, tied with rope, chiming and tinkling with each nudge from the breeze.

  “Huh.” James pushed aside his grudge long enough to ask Cai, “What, uh, do you suppose those are for? Is it a kind of festival tradition? Or maybe they’re alarms, like for—”

  “You’re the one who knows everything about monsters—you tell me.” But before James could huff and turn away, Cai went on, “It’s a deterrent. To keep something away.”

  “What could be… what could be scared away by bells?”

  Cai’s smile was grim, though he was clearly enjoying himself when he said, “Giant spiders, for one thing. They have been known to prowl this area.”

  “Cool,” James said before he could stop himself. “And, uh, freaky.”

  He was torn between wanting to see one badly and never wanting to see one.

  Bursting with questions but not wanting to ask Cai anything else, James glanced over the other members of their group. Iain wouldn’t know anything about giant spiders. The thought of speaking to Alvey made his stomach knot. His gaze flicked to Deirdre, who was walking beside his brother, and he almost smiled.

  Deirdre would think it was cool. She would think the bells were neat anyway.

  He nearly called her name, then hesitated, feeling like he had drunk ice-cold, bitter water as he swallowed down his words. She did not seem to be interested in confiding in him—not since the cave.

  Alvey it is then.

  He slowed his pace to walk beside Alvey’s chair, letting the others walk ahead.

  “What do you know about arachnids?” James asked.

  “That, James, is certainly the question every female longs to hear,” Alvey retorted without missing a beat. “Do continue, please. I have nothing better to do with my time.”