Shame exhaled and threw the cigarette to the ground. “Likely, yes. He’s in a mood, that one.”
I kept my mouth shut while Zayvion dug through the man’s mind. He took his hand off his forehead and then pulled his knife. One quick stroke and the man wasn’t breathing anymore.
Zay stood, stalked over to the three men on the other side of the room. One was dead already—gunshot. He put his hand on the other two men’s foreheads, digging through their brains with magic. Then snapped their necks with brutal efficiency.
“Check the well,” Zay said, a rough edge to his voice, as if he’d just been yelling his lungs out instead of whispering the brains out of people.
“Crazed rogue Closers,” Shame said. “Gotta love them. All business, no manners.” He clapped his hands together once. “Let’s get to this, shall we?”
I just stood there, staring at Zayvion. His eyes were hammered gold, no pupil at all, his jaw set as if trying to hold back a scream. It wasn’t fury that boiled beneath that expression—it was madness.
Too many minds, Dad said softly.
What? You mean he Closed too many minds?
It wasn’t just Closing, he said. He was sorting through their memories, their knowledge, their lives. Four lives in just a few minutes is like trying to suck the ocean down in one gulp. He would have caused himself less pain if he’d just Closed them.
“Zay?” I said, walking toward him.
He locked his jaw, his nostrils flared, and he shook his head once, as if just hearing his name hurt. He managed to take a step away from me.
“Ah-ah, leave him a bit,” Shame said. “He’s got some sorting to do.”
Shame had knelt and taken off his boots and was stuffing his socks into them.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, glad to have something else to focus on, but also wondering if he had gone as crazy as Zayvion.
“Checking the wells,” he said. “What the hell do you think I’m doing?”
“Getting naked for no reason?”
“While that is always a pleasant option,” Shame said as he stood, “there’s no time for naked. Yet.” He tipped his head down, inhaled, then exhaled, as if setting himself to a heavy weight. He paced across the floor, working a very slow counterclockwise circle toward the center of the room where the patterned woodwork flowed into the symbol that marked where the well of magic swelled far below.
I’d seen him walk this way once before, back at the Blood well, moving as if he were walking on rice paper and trying not to tear it, as if there was a far-off sound that he could hear. It was meditative, a pure focus on magic that didn’t flare and move like most magic. No, this was more like Shame attuning to magic, making himself a grounding rod, a tuning fork.
But every step he took drew something from the floor, leaving behind black scorch marks. Death magic. He was drawing energy from the floor. Maybe even from the well or the earth around and above us.
Was he tasting the magic? With his feet?
Shame inhaled a quick breath in a soft ah as if he had just figured a lock. And then he strode straight to the center of the symbol, faced the door we’d come in through, and lifted his arms above his head, shaking his wrists a little so that his coat sleeves settled comfortably.
“Step back a bit,” he said.
I did so.
Shame called magic from the carvings in the ceiling, drawing it down around him like a very light rain. Except the rain didn’t fall all the way to the ground. It got to about shoulder level, and then a pulse of light in the center of his chest—the stone that Terric had accidentally embedded in Shame to keep him alive—absorbed the magic.
After a couple seconds, Shame drew his hands down and traced a Disbursement glyph. He was going with a short, quick pain. The Disbursement glyph flared and wrapped up his arm, hugging there like a purple leech and digging deep. I figured it was muscle aches.
He drew a glyph for Open, which hovered about three feet in front of him. He poured just a small bit of magic into it, and before the glyph was completely closed, he pulled a line of it with him as he turned to face the wall. He repeated the Open glyph, caught the edge, keeping it open as he turned, connecting it with the next glyph, turned to the next wall, did the same, and repeated the process on the last wall.
A circle of glyphwork, of spells, hung midair around him, glowing a soft yellow, each glyph connected to another. A very intricate and beautiful Open spell.
Shame was facing the door again. The Disbursement on his arm had grown to three times the size, each spell he cast bloating it and adding to the price of his pain.
He didn’t seem to notice. No one really noticed Disbursements. If I couldn’t see magic with my bare eyes, I wouldn’t even give it a second thought.
Then Shame tipped his left palm open and up, and used his right hand to trace a new spell over the top of it. This spell was black fire. He blew across his palm like blowing a kiss, and the black spell caught on the edge of the Open spell and burned through it, consuming it faster than a lit line of gunpowder. It crackled from one Open spell to the next, gaining speed.
Shame was breathing hard, holding his concentration on that black burning spell while the purple Disbursement sent out shocks of pain through his body.
The black spell zinged through the last Open, and exploded in a lash of black smoke tentacles in front of Shame’s face.
“Fuck it all.” Shame took a deep breath, got about halfway through a lungful, and wiped his face with the bend of his elbow.
“Shame?” I said.
“Minute.”
“No. Now.”
“I said wait,” Shame said.
“The floor’s opening,” I said.
“Oh.” He glanced down. “That’s right. Open up, you cranky bastard.” With what appeared to be a lot of effort, Shame walked toward me, away from the wooden floor that swirled like a lotus opening.
The Life well was beautiful, a glowing pool of magic that seemed bigger than the room we were standing in. It was the opposite of the Rift—that slice of dark magic between life and death. In death, the Rift was a black stream with flecks of opal rainbows glinting in the flow. The Life well was opal silver, white, with crystal slices that sparked with dark black rainbow fire.
I expected it to reek like hell, since every time anyone used magic, it stank to high heaven. But it didn’t smell bad. As a matter of fact, it didn’t smell like anything at all.
It was beautiful, raw power. I stared at it like I’d never seen magic with my bare eyes before. Truth was, until this moment, I felt like I never had.
Even the best Sight spell hadn’t been this clear.
“Oh,” I breathed. I suddenly understood why people would want it, would covet it. Why my father’s goal was to have magic in the right hands. The things that could be done with it, the possibilities of how the world could be shaped and formed, flickered in that light, with tempting, tempting promises.
This was what Leander and Isabelle wanted. This was what they wanted to control.
No, Dad said quietly. This is only half of what they wanted. When light magic and dark magic are joined, it is even more powerful, even more pure, even more deadly.
You think they want light and dark magic joined? I said. But it was broken to keep them apart. And now that they’re both in life together, they won’t want magic to go back together, will they?
They want power. They want control of life and death. Only magic can give that to them. Only dark and light magic joined can give that to them.
But you said there would need to be a Focal to join light and dark magic. A person who could hold it long enough to heal it. And everyone who’s tried has died.
Leander and Isabelle don’t care who they kill. They’ll look for a Focal, for a body strong enough they can possess it and then use it to bring dark and light magic back together into their hands.
Are you sure?
He hesitated. Then, I would do that if I wanted to rule magic. An
d the world.
“Might want to come back now,” Shame was saying.
Whoa.
“What did I miss?” I asked. The well wasn’t any more open than it had been; the pretty colors were just as pretty. Zayvion paced between the two piles of dead people on the far side of the room.
“You missed that.” Shame pointed. I followed his finger and had to squint against the crystalline brightness of magic.
“I can see the well,” I said. “Blindingly, actually.”
“Not the well; there at the edges where the magic is curling inward?”
I glanced at Shame. He wasn’t holding a Sight spell.
“Can you see the magic in the well?” I asked.
“Sure, let’s go off topic,” he said sunnily. “I cast Sight when you were doing your impression of a hypnotist’s assistant. I know how the magic is flowing. Satisfied? Now look.”
“Fine.” I looked at the edge of the pool that seemed to flow and curl back in on itself like a wisp of candle smoke hitting a glass bell.
“What am I looking at?”
“Do you see smoke?”
“Yes.”
“And where the smoke is touching?”
I held very still and stared. The well seemed to be getting smaller, the magic not reaching out as far. “The well’s shrinking?” I asked.
“The well’s not shrinking,” Shame said. “The magic is turning solid.”
And as soon as he said it, I could see it. It was like watching mud get deposited against a stone at the side of a river. As the magic flowed to the edge of the well, it left behind a thick sludge, tar that looked exactly like the black tar that had consumed Anthony and killed him. Tar that looked exactly like the poisoned magic that was killing Davy. And as that tar was building, the smoke was growing thicker too, pushing questing dark tongues into the crystal-hard shine of the magic.
“The poison,” I said. “The well is tainted.”
“That’s my guess,” Shame said.
“Shouldn’t we sample it?” I asked.
“Well, it’s not like we can just reach in and dip our hands in it, now, is it?” he asked.
“I guess not,” I said doubtfully.
“Christ, Beckstrom. No,” Shame said. “Sure we throw magic in spells, we twist glyphs like frickin’ balloon animals and fill them with magic. And you are a freak and can actually carry some magic inside your body. But the main word there is ‘some.’ This is the pure stuff, the endless stuff. Tapped straight to the roots that spread throughout the world. You touch it, it eats you.”
“Sounds like a story to keep kids from dipping their toes in,” I said.
“It’s not,” Shame said. “I’ve seen it happen.”
I looked away from the well to Shame. He was standing a respectful distance away from the well, his hands very carefully at his sides and in fists so that he didn’t draw on the magic at all, though I could see the steady stream that lifted in a gentle mist and filled the stone in his chest.
“Ex-friend of yours?” I asked.
“Dead friend of mine.”
“You do know that crystal in your chest is pulling on the magic,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “You can see that?”
“Yes. It’s been pulling magic from anything it can. And it’s been pulling on your life energy when there isn’t any magic nearby. Did you know that?”
He held his breath a moment, his dark green gaze steady. “It’s not like I’ve brought it up at the dinner table.”
“Have you had a doctor, a doctor who understands magic, look at you… at what the crystal is doing to you?”
“What do you think it’s doing to me?”
“It’s drawing on magic, I think to feed or charge itself. There were glyphs carved in that crystal. Glyphs my dad put there to hold magic and help it recharge.”
“That’s what the doctors said about it.”
“Is that all they said?” I asked.
“That, and they had never seen anything like it before.”
“It’s draining your life, Shame. I know Terric somehow used magic to bind this crystal to you when you were wounded during the wild magic storm, and I think he saved your life.”
“Please. I save my own life.”
“But,” I said over his grumbling, “the crystal was never meant to be fused into someone’s body.”
“Oh, you think?”
“What I think is it’s hurting you. Taking your life energy when it doesn’t have enough magic to fill it. It might be killing you, Shame.”
“I know.”
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”
“We’re all dying, Beckstrom,” he said with a steady kind of sobriety, as if he’d been so long staring into the face of death, he’d become accustomed to it. “Use magic, it uses you back. Until you’re dead. That’s the way it is.”
“It’s not how it has to be,” I said.
He gave me half a smile, his bangs falling over his eyes. “You are such a dreamer. Listen, Terric did what he thought he had to do. I thought… last time we were here and Mikhail possessed me… I thought that would be the end.” He shrugged. “Yet, here I stand. I’m not going to go easy, or quietly, crystal or no bloody crystal. But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t bring it up to my mum, okay?”
I nodded. “Is there someone in the Authority who might be able to remove it, or cancel the glyphs?”
“Not like I’ve had time to ask around.”
“Maybe Violet?” I said. “She invented the disks, and those hold magic a lot like the crystal. We could ask her if she has any ideas of how to negate its effects.”
“How about we unpoison magic, stop the spread of the plague that’s killing everyone, and convince the Authority that we got screwed by Bartholomew? Survival first, doctors later.”
I didn’t want to let it go, but he was right. If we called Violet and met with her, it would put her in incredible danger right now, since the Authority wanted us dead. Until we cleansed magic and cleared our names, it was better for the people we cared about to not be involved.
“All right,” I said, rubbing at my eyes underneath my glasses. “So magic’s been poisoned. Does it feel any different to you?” I asked.
“What’s magic supposed to feel like?”
“Just tell me if right now, while the crystal is drawing magic directly from the well into your chest, if magic feels any different from any other time you’ve pulled on it.”
“I thought we’d just agreed we were done with crystal talk.”
“We’re done with the doctor talk. Not the crystal talk.”
He rolled his head back to stare at the ceiling. “I do not know how you put up with her, Z.”
Zayvion didn’t say anything, but his pacing was slower now, his breathing calm. Whatever overload of information he was dealing with, it seemed to be easing some.
“If you can’t tell the difference in the magic, say so,” I said. “I just wondered if it hurt.”
“It hurts,” he said quietly. “It always hurts.” He lowered his gaze from the ceiling to look instead at me. “Since the minute Terric shoved this thing in my chest, nothing’s felt the same. Not my body, not my head, and for damn sure not magic. Death magic… It comes to me easier than before the crystal. That desire to consume and destroy, something a user always has to manage when casting Death magic, is”—he exhaled—“much, much stronger.”
“And now?” I asked. “Right now?”
“It’s not any worse than it ever is. Why?” he asked with darkness hooding his eyes. “You think I’m going to go evil?”
“Can’t go somewhere you’ve already arrived,” I said.
Shame laughed. “Fuck you. Just for that, you get to help me close the well.”
“We came all the way out here,” I said, “killed people, almost got killed, got the well open, and you want to close it? No. I want proof of the poison that I can shove in someone’s face if I have to. We need proof that
the well is tainted.”
“Which would be what, exactly?” Shame crossed his arms over his chest and waited for an answer.
Holy hells, I didn’t know. I didn’t have a camera, or a cup, or a balloon animal. “When you pulled on magic from the well, it didn’t stink like the rot. It still doesn’t smell bad.”
“I think the taint is just beginning to take root,” he said.
“So it might not have started here,” I said.
Shame shrugged. “Or it’s been self-purifying.”
“Is that possible?”
“This has never happened before. Anything is possible.”
“Which means it might have started somewhere else,” I said. “A different well. Maybe the Death well?” A memory of the Veiled pulling up out of the crypt in the Lone Fir Cemetery came to me, along with the memory of the Veiled stepping into one another, possessing one another. Had this all started there?
Leander had been there too, and one of his Veiled had nearly killed Shame, Terric, and me. He must have been there for a reason.
But then, Leander had been a lot of places doing a lot of harm. Including in Maeve’s inn, over the Blood well.
Maybe Leander didn’t have anything to do with it and the contamination was coming from a cistern. Bleeding out, or bleeding back into the wells. Hell, I wouldn’t put it past Bartholomew to have planted a poison, just to tear apart the network lines and conduits of magic my father had made.
“Where does your head go when you frown like that?” Shame asked. “Is it your dad in there kicking around?”
“No, I was just thinking that we need to check the other wells. Blood and Death, at least. Places Leander has been. Places the Veiled have shown up en masse lately. And we should check the other cisterns too. We have a lot of ground to cover.”
“You make too many plans,” he said. “Right now, the only thing that needs to be done is to close this well. That, and maybe see if Zayvion’s found a way to unscramble his brains.”
“They’re not scrambled,” Zayvion said in a raspy voice.
Shame didn’t look at him, but smiled. “He’s getting there. This—” He pointed at the floor. “Closed. Before someone calls to check on Bartholomew’s buddies over there and finds out they’ve finally kicked their nasty breathing habit.”