Illicit Magic (Book 1, Stella Mayweather Series)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I let Eleanor’s lifeless heart slip from my hand and fall to the floor with a dull thump.

  With bile rising in my throat, I forced myself to look at my outstretched hands. They were stained with her blood. My stomach turned over and I hastily wiped my hands on my jeans as I stepped away from the organ. I reached for Kitty just as Marc vaulted over the sofa. He caught her before she collapsed.

  “She needs help,” he said, his face was agonised and at last, I understood something else; how much he truly loved Kitty. The pain he must have suffered was terrible. He saw his father die and then the one person he adored being tortured by his mother. His world had collapsed in less than an hour, even if the events that brought us here had been put in motion almost twenty years ago.

  Marc eased Kitty into his arms and lowered her to the floor. His hands groped over her sweater and found the mess of her shoulder and arm through the thin jersey, before running down to her leg. Her face was beaded with sweat and pain, her skin ghostly pale. “I think her collarbone and shoulder are broken, her leg too.”

  I nodded, mute and horrified. “Where did Étoile go?” I breathed finally as I stepped further away, stumbling and almost falling over a broken lampshade. They didn’t need me anymore and now that I knew Kitty was safe, I had a more pressing urge. I edged through the debris to Evan and sank to my knees beside him.

  “She said she’d take Astra somewhere safe. Somewhere where she couldn’t hurt anyone else again, or herself.” Marc was cradling Kitty in his arms, her face lolling against his shoulder. Any other time they would have looked serenely content but not now, with their faces torn and scorched. I felt fleetingly glad that I was not envious of the comfort they found in each other’s arms. It seemed somehow fitting that they might gain something when so much had been lost.

  Evan still hadn’t moved. I brushed hair away from my face where it had broken free of its ponytail and shrugged off my sweater so I could press it against him to stem the bleeding from his head wound. I laid my ear on his chest and his heart seemed faint and uncertain as I willed myself not to cry. Of all the people I had come to love and like over these past few weeks, he was the one I couldn’t bear to lose and now, he was slipping away at my fingertips. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t healing. A salty tear coursed over my smudged face and dripped on him. I felt a little burst of energy echo from me. It was like wearing nylon and getting an electric shock that tickles at the skin, creating sparks.

  My back was against the door into the hallway and I could hear other people stumbling through. Whatever magic Eleanor had spun to set up barricades to enclose us in the house had fallen when she did and I breathed a sigh of relief. The air was whispering to me. Help was coming.

  I compressed my bare hands harder against Evan’s wound, my fear of losing him turning to desperation and felt the current again, but this wasn’t the white hot anger I felt when facing Eleanor. I reached inside myself for the last ebb of energy and poured myself into him, not understanding what I was doing but knowing that if I didn’t try to fix the internal damage, in some small way, Evan would die with me by his side, never knowing that he saved my life and we won the battle.

  He told me I could take power from him and now I was giving it back. Light flickered from me and seeped around my frame and his. It seemed to stream from me to him and, for a few fleeting moments, I felt we were one and the same. I cried with the pain of the work I didn’t understand and the pain losing him would cause me. When I could not send any more of my energy to him, I crouched over him and rested my head on his chest, my silent sobs shaking me. I could feel him; not just his skin or his fading warmth but the magic welling in him. I could see it. It was like a light cord had been yanked thrusting me into the sun after a lifetime of darkness. The magic trickling through him was white hot but it was fading too. My heart thumped. He was so weak.

  It was Étoile who lifted me off him, then pulled me to her and let me finish weeping dirty tears on her favourite jacket. I didn’t even realise she had returned and I briefly wondered where Astra was.

  “He’s alive,” said Étoile, pushing me away gently so she could rest her long fingers against the pulse on Evan’s neck. A haze of pink seemed to trip languidly over her. “But we need to move him now. Eleanor’s magic has interfered with ours and he can’t heal here.”

  “Stella, darling, we’re going to get Evan some help.” Seren delicately pried my fingers from where they were coiled around his shirt’s placket.

  “I’ll come too.”

  Seren shook her head. “We aren’t strong enough. It will take both Étoile and I to move him and we can’t manage another. We’ll come back for you, I promise.”

  Before I could say anything, she and Seren were holding Evan with one hand while clasping each other’s hand. They locked eyes and vanished, leaving the air charged with magic for a few plaintive moments. I could see, feel and smell magic everywhere around me. I felt like I was drowning in it.

  Exhausted, I stayed on my knees where Evan had fallen, the debris forming a makeshift marker around the place where he lay. Choking back the last of my tears, I wiped the few escapees from my smudged face with my sleeve. I tried to feel relief that Evan would soon get help, but all I could feel was a desperate sadness. My throat felt raw from the sobbing as well as the acrid taste of burning and Kitty’s mist. My body was shattered. I knew I couldn’t do this anymore. I never expected to have to fight for my life. I never expected that I would have to kill. In self defence, a weary part of my mind reminded me. I never wanted to kill. Or be a killer. It was self defence.

  I fully expected to die in this room, I suddenly realised and the panic started to rise in me.

  Kitty groaned behind me and the noise brought me rushing back to the present. When I turned to them, I saw a faint sheen surrounding both her and Marc. Marc was brushing his fingertips at the colour around his coat in wonder.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  “Your magic,” I said simply.

  A thought had been niggling at me for a while, never quite becoming a fully formed idea but now I knew what had held Marc back. Eleanor had spellbound her own child so that his magic could never come to fruition. It was illegal among witches, so her reasons for doing it to her own child were beyond me. I could never be sure, but I suspected jealousy and bitterness had a lot to do with it. She resented Robert’s lack of intuitive power, considering him weaker than she, and I wondered if she might’ve been frightened of Marc’s potential, just as she had been frightened of mine.

  Instead of nurturing her son, she caged him in a life which had no value in her world. She continued to resent him, and taunt him, because she planned to leave him behind. Perhaps there was no rhyme or reason to it. Perhaps it was just another act of her cruelty.

  “It has a colour?”

  “I think because it’s suddenly come back after so long. It’s more intense.” It was a guess but it sounded right, though I faltered when I thought about it. I had never seen a colour surround anyone else until moments ago; but Evan had seen mine the first time we met. I wondered if everyone with magic could see auras like Marc’s pulsing, shimmering emerald – so much more vibrant than his mother’s pallid hue – and I wondered what he would be able to do now. I hoped the return of his magic made him happy and gave him a place in the world that both accepted and excluded him. I hoped he wouldn’t be too hard on Étoile for teasing him all this time.

  “You need to get Kitty out of here.”

  Kitty was lying unconscious in his arms but every so often she would let out a low groan. I suspected her physical recuperation would be lengthy once the bones were realigned. I hoped she would recover mentally too. Apparently, I was hoping for a lot at that moment. Maybe if I spread the hope around like a splatter gun something would stick.

  Marc nodded. “Where should I take her?”

  “You know better than I. There must be someone you can call?”

  David was scra
mbling towards us. His glasses had been knocked from his face and his hair stood up in tufts. He looked downright shell-shocked.

  “We need to find Christy and Clara. They must be terrified,” he said, his voice unsteady. He looked around the room and groaned. I followed his gaze to Jared’s body. He wasn’t moving and I could see the whites of his eyes. We scuttled towards him.

  “He had such promise,” David muttered, staring down at him. “With time, he would have been really good. I shouldn’t have unbound him, but I couldn’t leave him unprotected. The idiot. The brave idiot.”

  I took David’s hand in mine and he patted my hand with his free one. We looked at Jared for a moment, then David leaned forward very slowly and used his fingertips to draw Jared’s eyelids down.

  “He didn’t deserve this,” I said and David inclined his head in the briefest of nods.

  Behind us, I heard Marc dialling on his phone before speaking urgently into it. After a few moments, someone else teleported into the room: a young woman in jeans and a cropped jacket. She knelt beside Kitty and felt for her pulse, timing it against her watch.

  “We got your call just as Étoile and Seren arrived,” she explained hurriedly as if Marc was about to admonish her for being tardy. She sniffed the air and grimaced. “Is anyone else injured?”

  Marc shook his head. “No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Let’s go.” The woman put her hands on Kitty and Marc. They were gone before I could ask after Evan, or where they were going, or even who she was.

  “Someone will be here soon,” said David, who lingered in the doorway. “If they weren’t alerted at the hospital, someone else will sound the alarm. No surge of magic like this goes unnoticed.”

  “How would they notice?”

  “They just do. The council notices everything.”

  “They didn’t notice Eleanor,” I said, still unable to look at her. I had a right to be sceptical. The head of their organisation was a maniacal murderer who escaped their notice for years.

  It was David’s turn to be cynical. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.” He was stroking his scar again, in that absent-minded way of his.

  I looked at him with curiosity. Would they really have let Eleanor get away with murder? I wasn’t sure of anything, except that I didn’t trust the council as far as I could throw them. The corpses surrounding me – those of Robert, Eleanor, Jared, and what was left of Meg – were testimony to their neglect and ignorance without even counting the injured. The council were at best indifferent, at worst, incompetent, in my opinion.

  David returned my gaze with a cool look of his own and I wondered if I should reassess the geeky teacher. Perhaps he knew more than he was letting on, but my chance to ask him was foiled as something heaved against the front door. It splintered and twisted off its hinges. I braced myself for attack as a small group of men charged in, dressed to the nines in SWAT gear with the most enormous weapons. I would have reacted on instinct if David hadn’t immediately lurched between them and me as he greeted them, running a shaky hand through his dusty hair.

  “We’re here,” said one man, somewhat obviously, as he stepped forward. He shook David’s hand as if they were at a business meeting rather than a crime scene. “Is the problem contained?”

  “The problem is dead,” I muttered from behind David. I could feel the shadows of Evan’s power behind me; it seemed to hang in the space. I didn’t want to look at the imprint he left behind in the debris, lest I unleash the uncried tears bubbling inside me.

  The man who appeared to be the leader looked past David to me and then around the scene. He surveyed the damaged room and the results of Kitty’s mist and the conflicting incantations from Eleanor. I realised that Robert never had a chance to spin a spell of his own before he met his fate. Residual magic seemed to hum in the thick air, like a stagnant heat wave.

  “We’ll remove the bodies,” said the team leader, nodding at his men who were waiting for instruction. “And we’ll put everything to rights.”

  “The council knows about this?” David asked.

  “The order came from Steven,” confirmed the leader, removing his mask to show an unremarkable middle-aged face. “Killed a vampire, huh?” He looked vaguely pleased and full of admiration as I remembered Meg. Her ashes still smouldered in a heap a few feet away from me. I didn’t think there was anything to celebrate about her losing her life. As far as I knew, she was a sweet old lady who offered room and board to people she didn’t have to give a damn about. I didn’t want to get my head around the bit about her being a vampire just yet. Now that I had witches and vampires checked on my list, I didn’t even want to think about what else might be out there. I still wasn’t even certain what Evan was.

  “She was a good person,” I muttered, too weak to argue. I was almost grateful that the SWAT guy let it pass without comment.

  The crew ignored me. “Anyone else we should know about?”

  David took the lead again. “There’s just me and Stella here. Christy and Clara somewhere too; I guess they’re hiding. Everyone else has gone.” He looked around for his students, like it just dawned on him that he had no idea where they were.

  The man nodded and turned his back to issue directions to his team. Some of them fanned out through the house, weapons at the ready. When they returned a few minutes later, they whispered to their team leader and he turned to us impassively. “They found two more bodies upstairs. Two girls.”

  David nodded, his head bowed. He sighed. “Christy and Clara. What happened to them?”

  “According to my team, they were hit by a pulse of magic that took them straight out. They wouldn’t have felt a thing.”

  It was strange to hear a magical SWAT team use the same platitudes that a regular cop would use. I was too exhausted to comment; too worn out to even cry. I didn’t know if I should feel relief or anguish as the crew retreated outside. Presently, they came back, minus their helmets and protective vests, carting cases loaded up with chemicals and mops. They were like a domestic cleaning crew, but on steroids.

  I couldn’t take anymore. I’d have to leave the questions and any supervision to David who, thankfully, had been spared most of the fighting. For me, the idea of talking calmly and logically about what happened was just too much.

  Stumbling past them, I lurched out of the room and aimed for the stairs. If I’d been in my right mind, or even a little less tired, I could have zapped myself to my room but I had to salvage what little energy I had left.

  The upstairs landing was just about intact and no one had been fighting in the bedrooms. My room was exactly as I left it.

  I headed straight for the bathroom and scrubbed my face and hands until they were pink and clean. I wanted to throw up as I pulled off my bloody clothes, dumping them on the bathroom floor. Maybe the cleanup crew would take them I hoped as I pulled on clean jeans, a tee and zip-up sweatshirt. I didn’t want to see a single stitch of those clothes ever again.

  When I stepped into my bedroom, still slightly rumpled from Marc’s rifling, the weight of what happened hit me. All the adrenaline that had kept me upright and talking dissolved and I dropped to my knees in the centre of the room, my chest heaving as the sobs wrenched my heart.