She dug in her bag for the key, barely noticing the way its energy zinged up her arm. She grabbed whatever else she could find, not even sure why she was grabbing some of it: cobwebs and a chunk of snake, a black mirror and a small pouch full of bones and claws. Ajenjible and sapodilla seeds, corrideira and powdered salamander eyes.
The pile of spell ingredients before her grew, while she slipped in and out of consciousness and kept tossing things onto it. Everything she had, a huge mishmash of odds and ends, and it dawned on her that some spells would explode if they were turned back on themselves.
Most dark spells would do that, in fact.
Shock transmitted itself down the cord to her. Fuck, he’d heard her thoughts, felt what she was doing. The tower in which she stood started to rock, pushed and pulled by bespelled hands with supernatural strength.
Time to make a choice. She might have enough power to use the key, to overtake the spell and set the horde free, even if only for a brief time. She might have enough power to feed into an anti-spell to make the original spell—and the Agneta Katina—explode.
But she didn’t have enough power to do both.
She chose the ship.
He felt her choice; fresh power burst along the cord, burst into her body, kicking her out of it. She watched it crumple, watched Lex picking her up, from what felt like a very great distance.
Watched Lex grab his gun and start shooting at the boat, heard other gunshots echoing off the steel. More men—Lex’s men, Bump’s men—on top of buildings, shooting at the crowd, shooting at the boat. Yes! Thank fuck for Lex, Lex and that twisted brain of his. A distraction was what she’d needed and he’d given her one, and she thudded back into her body and gasped, “Get me on the ship. Hurry up,” as she threw her magic items back into her bag.
The next few minutes—it could have been minutes, it could have been hours; she had no idea—passed in a haze of power and exhaustion. What sounded like hundreds of gunshots still broke the eerie silence around them, and the tower rocked harder. Lex pushed her up against the windows, his arms on either side of her, pressing her against the glass. She managed to open her mouth—so dry, it was so fucking dry—and croak out, “What are you—”
“Hang on, Tulip,” he replied, and she looked down and saw it wasn’t just the bespelled horde at the base of the tower but Lex’s men, and it dawned on her what he was doing.
“Oh, you’re fucking kidding—”
The tower went down.
Glass exploded around her, tiny shards embedding themselves in her skin, tiny stings of pain everywhere. She welcomed it. It focused her, dragged her back into her body as another massive pulse of magic slammed down the cord and into her head. She focused on the pain, forced herself to stay with it, and opened her eyes to find herself hovering a few feet above the angry surface of the bay.
Her hands had found the metal bars framing the now-empty windows; she gripped the bars tighter, her body aching with tension and effort, and tried not to fall into the water.
At least until she realized that she needed to fall into the water, needed to do it fast, because the horde was crawling along the fallen tower. She was going to end up in the bay no matter what; the question was whether she did it on her own steam or because they pushed her, and something told her that if they pushed her, she wouldn’t be getting out alive.
The rope ladder hung off the side of the Agneta only a few feet away. She could reach it. She’d have to reach it.
Of course, chances were good someone would slice it when she was halfway up, but as with so many other things, she didn’t have a choice. So she let go of the bars and fell into the icy blackness below.
Fuck, she hated the water. It covered her, knocked the wind out of her. She tried to open her eyes but couldn’t see, tried to surface but couldn’t tell which way was up. Hands grabbed her, yanked at her hair; she fought against them until she realized they were Lex’s, and just as her lungs felt ready to explode, her head broke the surface.
That wasn’t much better. Already the horde splashed into the water around her, coming for her. Lex dragged her—she’d never realized he knew how to swim, let alone that he was pretty good at it—toward the boat, much faster than she could have made it alone. It seemed like an endless struggle in the freezing cold sea of blackness, trying to keep hold of Lex while furious magic tore down the cord and into her soul.
But the sorcerer hadn’t cut the ladder. It wasn’t until she closed her hand around it that she realized why. Of course he hadn’t cut it. He wanted her to come up there, wanted to kill her and be done with it, with her. Wanted, maybe, to pull her deeper into his spell and use her power to make it even stronger.
Her muscles shook with effort as she dragged herself up the rope, her palms burning from the rough fibers, her legs aching. Yes, he was waiting for her up there, waiting to kill her, because the magic binding her receded enough for her to think and that had to be the reason.
She could still feel it, though. Still feel him ordering his horde around, driving them into the water, driving them to further violence. More gunshots behind her; she knew without looking that the horde had turned on Lex’s men, that they’d started fighting again in earnest.
Where was Terrible in all of that? What was he doing?
Not the time to think of it, not when she hit the little loading deck where she and Terrible had been earlier, with Lex right behind her. The rope twisted and jerked in her hands; more men followed, but whether they were Lex’s or the bespelled she had no idea, and she couldn’t pause to look. Instead, she ran down the hall to the stairs and up.
He was going to be waiting for her as soon as she got to the top deck. She knew it. She knew it, she knew it. She braced herself for the hand in her hair, the slash of steel across her throat.
With one last desperate plea to no one that she make it onto the deck alive, she hit the last flight of stairs and raced to the top, found the door to the deck, and burst through it.
Empty. No one stood there, no one waited for her, and the thought had barely registered when an explosion deafened her, a loud metallic gong right by her ear.
He wasn’t waiting for her there, no. He was waiting in the wheelhouse, in that tower on deck, and he was shooting at her.
All of that flew through her mind in a barely coherent rush as she threw herself sideways, hugging the steel wall. Where to go, where to go? Running toward the wheelhouse would bring her closer to him, where she’d be an easier target, but where the hell else could she go? No place to hide, not that she could see.
Men tumbled onto the deck behind her, surrounding her, pushing her along. More gunshots. Bodies fell; screams rose into the air; and she kept running.
If she left the deck and reentered the boat to do her spell, she’d be better able to hide. If she was belowdecks when the spell exploded—if it did, please let it explode—she’d almost definitely die.
The whole boat housed the spell, the whole thing, but somewhere in there had to be the heart of it, whatever totem or ingredient or whatever he was charging it with.
It was in the wheelhouse. That’s why he was there. Not just to watch her but to guard his spell.
Okay, then.
She pivoted and ran back, charging the tower with her head down. More clangs as bullets hit the metal beneath her feet; she saw naked steel appear beneath chips in the paint, moonlight shining off the bare spots like stars trapped in the floor.
Lex pushed in front of her when she hit the wheelhouse door. He yanked it open and shoved his gun in, nearly deafening her with the sound of shots in the small space. Not all his, either. Fuck, this was it, she was going to die—
No. The connection—the cord of magic—had been silent for so long she’d almost managed to forget it existed, but something about the way Lex’s men jostled around her, the way they moved in unison, reminded her. No, she might not have enough power to short out the spell, but neither did she need to. She was inside the spell. She wasn’t its ma
ster but she had power of her own, and she knew how to get more, and she didn’t need to short out anything or take over anything in order to do it.
He’d given it to her. The smug son of a bitch had given it to her, and she was going to take it.
If she hadn’t been so scared she would have laughed. As it was she closed her eyes, took one long, deep breath, and reached out.
She reached out to all of them, all of them connected to her by the spell that trapped them. She reached out and found their energy, weak as it was, found the power connecting them, wrapped her hands around it, and yanked. Hard.
Energy flooded into her, so much energy her vision went black. She struggled with it, trying to force it into something smooth, something coherent, and when the sorcerer’s rage came through to her clear and strong she absorbed that, too. Absorbed everything, as much as she could, until she felt as if she’d explode if someone even touched her, as if her skin was stretched tight around a glowing ball of magic.
She couldn’t beat him and his spell with her own power, no. But she could do it with his.
At least, she really fucking hoped she could.
She barreled through the door, shoved the power up the cord as hard as she could, and aimed it all at him. Through the line she felt him stagger with it, felt him brace himself, and while he was doing that she raced up the stairs on feet she barely felt.
And found Mr. Carmichael—Kyle Blake’s “assistant,” the elegant gray-suited man she’d met at his house—struggling to stand as he braced himself on some sort of instrument panel behind him, magic throbbing all around him in a haze she could practically see. Magic he generated; it was him. Of course.
The instrument panel; the wheelhouse. The heart of the ship. The heart of the spell. She felt it the second her feet hit the floor. Felt its seductive dark call snaking through the air, adding to the power already inside her.
Carmichael wasn’t the only one in the room. But he was the only one who mattered. Lex’s men had headed straight for him, straight for his guards; the air in the small space filled with violence and the sound of flesh against flesh, with groans and last breaths. Chess ignored it. He’d come for her in a second, Carmichael would, he’d throw off Lex’s men and come for her, and she had to get her spell—her anti-spell—ready before he did, because she couldn’t beat him. Even the borrowed power thrumming in her body wasn’t good enough, because it was his power; she’d managed to surprise him with it and knock him off balance, yes, but she couldn’t hold him off for long.
Where was the power source?
Bodies knocked into hers, forced her to crouch and brace herself as she searched, her skin prickling as she felt his eyes on it. He was coming, he was coming, she didn’t have time to set everything up; all she could do was hope for the best.
From her pocket she pulled her knife. From her bag she pulled the mirror and snake, the herbs wet from their dip in the bay but hopefully no less powerful. Where to set them—
Hands in her hair, yanking her, knocking her to the floor. Carmichael’s furious face above her, his eyes blazing with rage as he lifted a shining blade over her head, ready to bring it down.
The second he touched her, the spell inside her—the speed and the magic—washed over her again. She was connected to him, connected so deep, and when that thought hit her mind she realized that he was the power source. The boat housed the spell, but he was its master. Things moved beneath his skin—what the fuck was that? How was he even alive, how the fuck did that work—
Lex slammed Carmichael in the side of the head with his gun; Carmichael fell sideways, catching himself before he tumbled off Chess. His knife fell sideways, too, slicing into her arm, and as her blood fell on his skin, as it fell onto the floor of the wheelhouse, she saw the horror in his eyes and guessed at what it meant.
If she was right, she’d win. If she was wrong, she’d die. She grabbed the magic items she’d dropped, clenched them in her fist, and pressed them to his arm—to the rivulet of her blood on his arm. “Kesser arankia. With blood I bind.”
Carmichael screamed. The energy jolting down the cord still connecting them jerked, it jerked and it changed, and she felt his terror, felt something swell behind it.
“Septikosh, mellikosh, hatarosh—”
Carmichael tried to jump off her. She grabbed him with her numb right hand, letting her blood flow faster onto his skin, and brought her left up in an arc beneath it. Her left arm, and her left hand, holding her knife.
Power exploded the second her blood hit his. His screams grew louder, higher, shrieks of agony. She thought she might have been screaming, too; she wasn’t sure, but she knew she’d stopped when he crumpled off her to the floor.
Now he was bound to her and she could feel what he was, how inhuman he was, that he’d done things, evil things, to gain power and turn himself into the spell’s master. He’d become something else, something held together and bound by magic, and that meant he was something she could destroy.
Her blood in his veins. Her power in his veins. He shrieked, his voice horrible and sharp as the others watched. He … curdled, somehow, on the floor. Like a slice of cheese left out too long, shriveling into himself as he screamed.
No time to be compassionate. She managed to catch Lex’s eye and gasp, “Time to go,” before she took the energy she still held inside her, the energy from all those people caught in the spell’s trap, and shoved it back into Carmichael as hard as she could. Shoved it into her binding, into the anti-spell she’d cobbled together, and just before the Agneta Katina exploded she felt the spell release its prisoners.
Blackness. Silence. Freezing cold and so dark she couldn’t breathe. She opened her mouth to scream but water rushed into it; she choked, her limbs flailing, trying to figure out— She was in the bay. She was in the bay, and she was drowning.
Trying to fight the urge to breathe, the urge to move, was like trying to fight the urge to take another pill after she’d crashed from the last dose. Almost impossible. But she did it, she forced herself to go limp, and holy fuck, it worked. She surfaced, lifting her face to the sky, and struggled, choking and gasping, to breathe.
The water in her lungs didn’t want to let her. She coughed so hard she thought she might lose those lungs altogether, that they might fly out of her mouth to join the detritus of the Agneta Katina rising and falling around her.
Flames rose off the surface of the water; the Agneta’s skeleton, wreathed in fire, groaned as it sank inch by inch. Chess searched for the cord inside her, the spell, and didn’t find it. It was gone. It was gone and she was alive. She’d done it, and she could find Terrible and they could go home, and she’d done it.
Now she just had to get back to shore, and that didn’t look like an easy distance. Her bag—holy shit, the strap was still wrapped around her, thank fuck for that one—hung off her like a corpse, her wet clothes clinging heavily to her skin.
Where was Lex? Shit, where was Lex?
She’d told him to get off the boat, but she had no idea if he’d had time to do so, if anyone had. No idea if anyone else had survived the explosion. What if— Shit, if Lex died …
Not the time to think about it, especially not when her legs and hands had started to numb out from the cold. Make it back to dry land, that was what she needed to do. She’d find Lex there, or he’d find her there, because he would be there. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—contemplate the idea that he wouldn’t be.
Swimming had never been an activity she’d enjoyed. Swimming in the dark waters of the bay, fragrant with dead fish and sewage, didn’t make her like it any more. Especially not when her brain refused to stop showing her images of sharks and sea monsters, of diseases that loved to breed in unclean water and were probably burrowing into her—shit, into the open wound on her arm, and whatever others she hadn’t felt yet—with her every movement.
Finally she reached the dock and climbed up onto it, scraping her hands in the process. Still no sign of Lex. She couldn’t se
e any of his men, either; at least, she didn’t think she could. Too many people crowded along the street, watching the Agneta’s corpse lower itself into the bay, for her to pick out any familiar faces.
Shit, she didn’t have her phone. She’d given it to Lex, and he— Well, he was most likely on his way back to her place, or waiting for her, maybe on the rooftop where they’d all met up earlier.
That’s where she’d head, then. Now that the spell had ended, the fight would end, as well, so it shouldn’t be hard to— What the fuck?
The fight hadn’t ended. The fight was going on, loud and vicious, but it wasn’t Carmichael’s horde doing the fighting. It was Bump’s men. And Lex’s. They’d worked together until the threat had passed and then turned on one another. Shit.
She made her slow, cautious way along the outskirts of the battle, aware with each passing step of another ache, another injury. It felt like she’d been hit by a twenty-ton block of ice; every inch of her felt raw and tender, and all the speed had worn off, leaving her jittery and dehydrated.
And she couldn’t do more; all of her own clean drugs would be ruined from her twin dips in the bay. Fuck. She had more at home, yeah, but that didn’t help her much. She couldn’t exactly head back there right at that moment. First she needed to find Terrible, and Lex.
If she made a strange picture—stumbling through the fight, soaking wet and bloody—no one paid any attention. Fine with her. She didn’t pay much attention to the men she passed, either, except quick glances to make sure none of them were Terrible or Lex. With each step, her unease grew. Where were they? Where was Terrible, where was Lex?