“I’m not Recorded yet.”
“Baby, I want to know what you mean, but when we are gone from here.”
They followed bloody footsteps through the massacred living room. Dajia paused by her parents, studiously ignoring their dismantled bodies as she lifted their wands from their cooling blood. She shoved the two slim tools beneath the waistband of her blue jeans and let her t-shirt fall to conceal them.
Bloody footsteps continued through the foyer—where the staircase had been blasted to pieces—and out the front door. By the shift in direction on the front walk, the regulators had moved on to the next house—the Richardson’s. Humans, so they’d be safe. Terrified, but safe. Her parents’ blood in the shape of the regulators’ boots faded from sight in the grass.
Nana hustled her down the sidewalk through sprinkling rain. The evening was black and unseasonably warm for a northern October. They had yet to have their first snowfall of the season.
Dajia stopped in her tracks and yanked her hand from her nanny’s. “My things!” she protested, looking back at the house she called home.
“Things can be replaced, Dajia,” Nana said, voice hushed against the biting wind. “You cannot.”
“I don’t understand what happened!” The sky opened, and the heavens released, cool rain soothing her hot face. “They were loyal to the regent!”
Nana doubled back, snatching one of Dajia’s hands in both of hers. She could no longer tell if the liquid on her nanny’s face was tears or rain. “Day, I know.”
“How did the curse not find my magick?”
“I don’t know, but my only concern now is that you are still alive. We must keep moving. From this moment forward, you are human and you are my daughter. Do you understand?”
Dajia nodded, rain plastering her hair to her face.
Her parents’ bloody wands burned like acid on her bare stomach as she turned her back on the life she knew and walked into an uncertain future.
2
Dajia
I’m going to be late for sector curfew. Again.
An empty plastic bag trailed across the sidewalk, the slide of plastic on concrete like a brush against dead skin. Dajia shivered and tugged her jacket tighter, keeping her head down and her gait fast. If the regulators found her out right now, they’d slap her with a fine she couldn’t afford to pay, especially with regency taxes coming due next week.
Charlie just had to go for drinks after the writing club meeting. All Dajia wanted to do was go home, eat dinner, and grade her students’ quizzes on Shakespeare’s sonnets, but her best friend was adamant they deserved a treat to celebrate the end of the school year.
Which was still two weeks away. That made no difference to Charlene Harley, party girl with a taste for local ale. In reality, Charlie just wanted a reason to pick on Dajia and her neglected libido.
“You’re shriveling up like an old maid,” Charlie had chided twenty minutes in, after dispensing with the small talk. She tossed back the rest of her glass and motioned to the bartender for another, her golden curtain of hair swishing with the movement. “What about Rex? He’s hot.”
Dajia rolled her eyes but gave the bartender in question a polite wave. “He’s married.”
“Everyone is either married or dead. Clearly, sex with one is better than the other. Your vagina is going to close up from disuse.”
“You’re disgusting,” Dajia had replied, unable to keep the fondness from her voice. Charlie had that effect on her: a simultaneous adoration and the desire to punch her. But Dajia wasn’t one for violence, so the adoration always won out.
She could admit it had been a while since she broke it off with Isaiah. And yes, her libido had noticed the sudden downswing in her sex life. Not that sex with Isaiah had ever been earth-shaking. In a word, sex with Isaiah was serviceable.
As if she could read Dajia’s mind, Charlie remarked, “Why don’t you just go fuck Isaiah?”
“He’s engaged now.”
“Asshole didn’t let any grass grow, did he?”
“With the regent pressuring us to procreate, some people don’t feel like they have a choice. His fiancée is already pregnant.” Dajia tried to muster any kind of emotion regarding her lost love and his new family, but there wasn’t anything left. They’d wanted different things. They’d always wanted different things. It just took Dajia a while to figure that out.
“God, it’s like a bad film.” Charlie’s voice deepened. “Deep in the northern wilds of Sector 14, the population is declining. One man, Regent above all, forces his people to breed like pigs.”
“It is concerning,” Dajia argued, trying to hide her amusement with a stern glare. “The conception-to-term rate has declined almost forty percent in the past decade. We’ll die out eventually at this rate.”
“You talk like a textbook.”
“Not the first time you’ve told me that.”
“Won’t be the last.” Charlie accepted her new beer from Rex—who admittedly did look nice in his black jeans, married or not. “Did you hear the council is set to vote on making birth control illegal?”
Dajia made a face and held up a finger for one more drink, and they both watched him saunter back to the bar. It was definitely a nice ass. “Guess I really should get laid before that comes to pass.”
Charlie lived around the corner from their favorite hangout. They had said goodbye not long after, both lost in their own thoughts: Charlie on sex, most likely, and Dajia on the fate of the human race, which said a lot about their two vastly different personalities.
Dajia unfortunately, lived damn near across the city. So she would be the one paying the price for being out past curfew.
If they caught her.
Dajia slipped a hand into the pocket of her winter coat, palming her dad’s rose quartz wand. She could weave a spell of invisibility to get her home undetected. She’d been using the quartz wand as her own for years, though it never felt like hers. She’d missed out on the Wanding, a sacred ceremony that took place at thirteen. The fledgling witch was honored in ritual, her soul fragmented to fashion her wand and give birth to her full potential, and her existence Recorded in the archives. The Wanding was the biggest event in a witch child’s life.
Dajia, unfortunately, had been neutered of her potential and hidden at nine.
Gods, was that fifteen years ago? She’d be twenty-four in a few months, which sounded ancient—too close to the downhill slope to thirty. She should have married Isaiah and started a family three years ago. Twenty-four might as well have been spinsterhood in Sector 14.
She trailed her fingers over the smooth quartz. She still felt like that little girl who had shoved two blood-covered wands in her waistband in the moments after her parents’ brutal assassinations. Beneath her wool coat, beneath the warm flannel shirt and plain white t-shirt that kept her warm against the northern chill, a magenta stain marred her skin. A bruise-like reminder of their deaths—a tattoo of her mother and father’s life force, forged on her skin by their blood.
Dajia released the wand. Using magick in the open would have been suicide. If anything gave her away, the regulators would kill her.
She turned right, taking a detour down the street where she grew up. She could pass her childhood home with scarcely a glance now. Not long after the purge, the witches had moved to the northern beats behind fancy iron fences that weren’t necessarily closed and locked, but indicated a clear separation of power and class.
Only humans remained this far south now, and Dajia’s old house sat empty for a long time before an opportunist snatched it up and renovated it. A new family lived there—a cute young couple and their two sons. Dajia liked that new life had passed through that red-painted door, scattering bicycles and toy trucks in the yard on its way.
Lost in thought, she missed any indication that she wasn’t alone. Suddenly, a massive, lanky man with wild brown eyes and crazy black hair reared up in front of her.
“Boo!”
Dajia sl
ugged him. “Gods, Clark! You’re an ass!”
He chuckled, thoroughly enjoying his prank. Clark was her human cousin, closer to her than a brother, even, and he looked like her, too. His black hair hung shaggy in his dark brown eyes. He was taller, and Dajia was curvier, but they shared the same snow-pale skin and angled jaw.
Clark worked on the fishing boats down at the wharf as an engineer. He was also one of the few people who knew her to be a witch.
He slung an arm over her shoulders. “Come with me.”
“Clark, no. It’s after nine.” She gently tried to disengage from his stubborn grip.
“Cloak us if you’re so worried,” he teased. He gave a mighty tug, and she had no choice but to follow.
If they had to be constrained to a single plot of land in all of Othala, Dajia was thankful it was Sector 14. Though the weather stayed frigid in the winter and cool in the summer, the crisp, clear air allowed a girl to see for miles in all directions. One direction—inland—held mountains, but the other direction, the sea, both beautiful in their eternal ways.
Clark skipped down the rocky shelf, his leather jacket flapping around his thin torso as if he wore a cape. Dajia followed slower, careful in her steps on the uneven beach. Here, the ocean caressed smooth pebbles and stones interspersed with shells older than mankind.
The sky stretched velvet over the sea, millions of stars glittering like the snow on distant mountains. Dajia reached for them, her fingers tracing patterns on the heavens.
“We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion,” Dajia said softly.
“In other words?” Clark chuckled, math-minded and literary-negligent.
“Humans tend to place blame on external influences.” Dajia continued tracing the stars. They hummed beneath her fingertips. “We look for scapegoats, often in the form of beautiful things, beautiful people, loved ones. We’re destructive that way. We’ll blame the stars for our misfortunes, but not ourselves.”
Misfortunes. She thought of Sector 14’s declining population and placed the blame squarely on the murderous regent.
“Though some atrocities are obviously committed by others and blame should be justly placed,” Dajia said grimly. She’d harbored hatred towards the murdering regent since the day he stole her parents away from her.
“You and your love affair with words.” Clark tossed a pebble at the water. “Whatever man marries you is going to have strange bed-persons to share you with.”
“Shakespeare. Hemingway. Camus. Orwell.” Dajia grinned.
“You get around.”
“I wish.”
“Isaiah is a good guy. You missed the boat on that one.”
“Yes, Mom, thank you for your concern over my biological clock.” Dajia rolled her eyes. She moved her hand over the sky. The humming on her fingertips took form and shape, like it always did. She let her gaze roam the tiny, gleaming dots of flame and prophecy, opening her mind to what they needed to tell her.
“Are they talking?”
“The stars are always talking. They’re frightened,” she murmured. “They see peril ahead.”
Clark looked up, searching even though he couldn’t see like she did. “What are they telling you?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t tell. Dammit! I should have mastered this a dozen years ago.”
“That’s not your fault, Day.”
“No, it’s the damn regent and his ill-conceived notions of being superior and unchallenged.” Familiar anger rose inside her, coupled with frustration and the sense that she’d been unfairly robbed of her future as a witch.
Clark lowered his voice. “I don’t disagree with you, but you know you shouldn’t say things like that out loud. If they hear you—”
“They’ll kill me. Yeah. I know.”
They fell silent. Dajia swayed to the steady shush of the waves. The ocean spread like a mystery before them, making love to the beach and the horizon in equal measure.
Clark finally spoke again, his breath a crystalline shimmer. “Do you ever wonder if the other sectors are still standing?”
Dajia shivered. “All the time.”
“They must be.” Clark picked up another thin, flat pebble and launched it at the waves. It skipped twice before sinking beneath the inky water. “Othala is too big for us to be alone at the top of the world. Our regent has protected us this long. Others were stronger than he was then.”
“The Sixteen were the most powerful witches in the world,” Dajia agreed.
“I can’t believe they’ve lost against the ravagers.”
Dajia sucked in a breath.
“Oh, come on.” Clark rolled his gaze over her with a look of consternation. “You’ve never even seen one, so don’t act so horrified I said the word.”
“Words have power,” Dajia reprimanded. “Don’t give those monsters power by mentioning their race.”
Fifteen years had passed since the Reckoning, when the ravagers grew in strength and numbers and came after those who fought against them. These monstrous creatures had always existed in the dark corners of the world, preying on those who strayed from the beaten path. Over time, their population grew until they were infesting whole forests, bleeding into the human-populated areas. They rampaged entire cities, destroying everything—and everyone, human and witch—in their path.
Sixteen high witches came together, sectioning the world into sixteen sectors firmly cloaked by the magick of one High Witch. Nothing could get in or out without the regent’s permission.
Since the Reckoning, ravagers had taken near-legendary status as boogeymen. The children of Sector 14 grew up with a healthy fear of them, which kept them contained in the dome of magick, behind the safety of the physical walls.
As a gesture of reconciliation for mentioning the ravagers, Clark motioned toward the swaying waves. “Make magick for me?”
Dajia smiled shyly. Her lack of skills bothered her, but Clark had a way of making her feel like she wasn’t a lost cause. She glanced around to be sure they were alone and then removed her father’s wand from her coat.
She closed her eyes, recalling the days she’d stood on the same rocky beach with the same wand in hand, her father coaching over her shoulder. She may never have had the formal training to diversify her spellcraft and learn spell language, but she remembered the simple things she’d learned as a child.
“Aquamotus,” she murmured, waving the wand.
A tendril of dark water lifted from the surface, standing on its tail like a dolphin. Dajia focused on it, the tip of her father’s wand glowing pale pink.
She didn’t know much about the color of her magick. The pink, she surmised, was an offshoot of her father’s blood red power. As his daughter, she carried a genetic piece of him, so she could activate his wand at a lower level. Thus, the gods-awful pink color. But it was all she had. She had no idea what color her power could be.
She swirled the wand, smiling as the tendril of water danced through the air. She brought up her other hand and shifted her focus, turning the tendril into a hovering ball. She bounced the roiling ball of water twice, then let it pour like a waterfall back into the sea.
“Amazing.” Clark squeezed her shoulders. Her cousin knew magick was draining, and he also knew his presence helped her recharge. That was the entire reason behind the sectors: protect the humans, which in turn protected the witches.
Breathing hard from her efforts, Dajia stared across the ocean, drawing strength from Clark’s proximity. She could feel the sensation of his life-force slithering into her, strengthening her. He always promised it didn’t hurt him, nor did it weaken him, but she gently stepped away when she thought it was enough. She took several deep breaths, focusing on the shadowy sea.
Her breath caught in her throat.
A bright white light blinked lazily in the distance.
“What is that?” she breathed, pointing.
Clark
took a couple steps forward, his toes nearly in the water. “It’s a boat.”
“No. Really?” Dajia squinted at the ebony horizon. “That’s way outside the dome.”
“Which means it’s not someone from our sector.”
“They must be out of their minds! Outside the sphere of a regent’s magick! Holy Hecate, they could be killed by…” She trailed off, unable to utter the word she’d recently admonished her cousin for saying.
Clark stayed silent for a moment. “Or maybe they’re just brave.”
Dajia glanced at him. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll be thirty-two this year. I remember the world before the Reckoning. I remember when we were Gr—”
“Clark.” Dajia cut him off. “Words have power. We’re not that place anymore, and by giving voice to that name, you take power from Othala.” Even as she said the words, she felt like the council’s programmed flunky, reciting the laws they taught in school as if they carried the same weight as the laws of gravity.
“Just because we’re something new now doesn’t mean the old disappeared. I traveled. I saw parts of the world, places I’m not sure still exist.” Clark took a deep breath and let it out, flexing his fists. “Some days, I feel trapped. I get on the boats, and I want to gun the engine, turn toward the dome, and cruise through it like it isn’t even there. Life was more than this two decades ago.”
Daija touched his hand, offering what comfort she could. “This is our world now. Othala. Sector 14. We have to make the most of it.”
He lifted his chin in the direction of the boat. “Think they’re searching for something?”
Dajia slipped her hand into her pocket and palmed her father’s wand. “I think we’re all always searching for something.”
3
Dajia
It was well past ten before they skirted through the darkness toward home.
Clark waved a silent goodbye at his street and shoved his hands deep in his pockets, trotting away with more confidence than Dajia had. Clark actually appeared his age, so if regulators caught him, he might get away with a slap on the wrist and a Don’t do it again.
The Shadows and Sorcery Collection Page 40
