Allie Beckstrom 09 - Magic for a Price

  “Leander and Isabelle are going to step through one of those gates,” he said. “But not if I Close them first.”

  In the back of the van Stone snarled.

  “Stone?” Cody said.

  And then Stone literally tore the back door off the van and jumped out into the street.

  “Zay!” I yelled.

  Not because of Stone.

  The road in front of us exploded in a blast, chunks of concrete and dirt hurled our way.

  Zay yanked on the wheel and slammed on the brakes. I don’t know how he did it but somehow, the van did not roll over. We skidded sideways for several yards, then finally stopped.

  “Fuck,” Shame said. “Anyone hurt?”

  “Fine,” Nola said. “We’re fine.”

  I glanced at Zay. He was stock still, hands clenched on the steering wheel. Staring out the window.

  I looked out the window too.

  At the woman standing in the middle of the broken street.

  She wore a pair of dark slacks, sensible shoes, and a long, expensive wool jacket. Older than me…maybe even Maeve’s age. Short gray hair cut straight at the forehead and into spiky edges everywhere else. A thin, firm mouth and a hard jawline.

  Her eyes were wide—maybe they had been blue, maybe brown. Right now they were black. No color, no whites, just pure black. She was possessed by the oldest Soul Complements, two people who had been so powerful when they were alive, only breaking magic into light and dark had stopped their killing spree. They had been strong enough to escape death, to tear souls apart, to possess powerful magic users. And now, joined together in one body, they became the strongest form of magic user.

  I’d never seen her before.

  She, apparently, knew me.

  “Daniel Beckstrom,” she said. Her voice was that of a woman, but I heard her in double, a second voice echoing in my head. And that other voice was straight out of my nightmares. It was a blending of male and female. Leander and Isabelle.

  “Now you will die.”

  She pointed both hands at the ground. Like a hard wind rising, a storm of magic pounded through the air. I didn’t know how she was accessing magic, although the only thing that made sense was she had her own source, like the disks.

  No, she was using the people at the gates to feed magic from surrounding cities to her.

  That had to come with a hell of a price. I was sure they wouldn’t be able to bear it for long.

  Horizontal lightning strikes hissed across the sky like no wild magic storm I had ever seen before. Fire balls seared down and burned up from the ground.

  “Fuck it all.” Shame and Terric got out of the van at the same time Zay did. They all strode out onto the street.

  No. They did not just do that.

  Hell. So much for planning, for taking some kind of guerilla tactic against her.

  Hound instincts told me this was suicide. Never meet the enemy on the grounds they choose. Never fight an enemy straight on, on the terms they set.

  Unless you wanted to die quickly.

  And I refused to die. Not here in the middle of the street. Not at Leander and Isabelle’s beck and call.

  They weren’t the only pissed-off Soul Complements in this town.

  As a matter of fact, when it came to angry Soul Complements around here, they were outnumbered.

  “Stay here,” I said to Nola and Cody. I didn’t wait for their answer as I took off after Zay, Terric, and Shame.

  Zay stood several paces in front of the van, facing the Overseer, Shame and Terric on either side of him.

  I didn’t see Stone anywhere.

  “Stay back, Allie,” Zay said.

  Oh, like hell I would.

  “Beckstrom.” Their voices dug painfully into my head. “This game of yours is done. We have the final hand now. All magic is ours, light and dark, as it has always been meant to be. You have lost.”

  The Overseer hooked a finger, and the magic in the sky bent to her command.

  I didn’t know if I could use it. Didn’t know if even drawing a Block spell out of that mess of magic would kill me.

  The fear of death, so close, so recent, made me hesitate.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Everything seemed to slow.

  Allison! Dad yelled.

  I felt his fear, tasted the sour copper of it against the back of my throat.

  He had good reasons to be worried. The sky was breaking. The ground was breaking. A building fell, the dust rolling out in strangely liquid slow motion.

  Magic licked like fire. From the sky. From the ground.

  Headed toward me.

  Toward me and Dad.

  To kill us.

  I drew on that same magic. Just like Shame had drawn on the Hold spell around the Veiled.

  Too late, much, much too late. Magic answered me, but scraped ice through the black mark in my left palm, pulled fire through the opalescent metal marks on my right.

  Shield.

  It wouldn’t save me.

  But I refused to die this easily. From one strike.

  Because I was angry. More than angry. Furious. They had no right. No right to tear my world apart. To kill so many. They had no right to try to kill my already dead father.

  The Shield carved a wall around me, flames of magic weaving a tight netting that could not be breeched.

  My skin was on fire. My bones were freezing. I couldn’t do this, couldn’t survive drawing on their magic to use magic against them.

  Their attack pounded down.

  It was like standing on a rock while the entire ocean rose up…

  …and crashed on top of me.

  Only it wasn’t water. It was magic. Too damn much magic.

  Drowning, crushing.

  Enough to kill me.

  And then Zay was there, his hand on my right wrist, his hand on my left. Warm, solid, real. He pulled me against him. Taking my pain, paying my price without even casting a Proxy spell.

  He had walked right through my Shield like it wasn’t even solid, though it reformed around him, and became stronger as he drew upon the stream of attack to bolster my Shield.

  Breaking the rules of magic. Making it bend to his command. Pushing magic away so that I wasn’t drowning anymore. Wasn’t hurting anymore.

  Leander and Isabelle weren’t the only people who could break magic.

  “We can’t win,” I tried to yell. I couldn’t hear my own voice over the roar of magic.

  “Not here,” he said. “Can you reach St. Johns?”

  The magic there. He wanted me to reach for St. Johns’ magic. “I’ll try.”

  Zay shifted to hold the Shield around us. That was unpleasant.

  I reached out, seeking the promise of magic miles from us. If it was there, I couldn’t reach it.

  I bit down on a moan, though he wouldn’t have heard me if I screamed. The pain I felt for using magic, he felt too. And on top of that, he was paying the price for using this magic.

  Pain didn’t stop him. He drew on even more magic being thrown at us and twisted it into a spear, cursing more than chanting. Then he heaved it straight at the Overseer’s heart.

  She raised one palm and the spear of magic slipped sideways to burn a hole into the concrete at her feet.

  “Guardian,” they said with her mouth. “You hold what we want. Give us the dead man.”

  She carved a glyph into the air.

  Magic stalled. It refused to fill that glyph, falling away from her like fog tattered by a strong wind.

  Shame drank down the magic she tried to pull on, and poured that magic into Terric’s hands. Terric shaped magic, and wielded spells that he threw at her again and again.

  They were amazing, fast, fluid.

  Blood ran down one side of Shame’s face. Terric wasn’t using his left hand very well. They didn’t pause, didn’t stop.

  They threw a spell that sucked all the magic out of the air in a circle around the Overseer.

  “Now!” Terr
ic yelled.

  The crack of bullets unloading in rapid succession ricocheted off the buildings.

  Nola stood on the side runner of the van, shotgun tight against her shoulder. She didn’t stop firing until she was out of bullets.

  Magic is fast.

  Bullets are faster.

  It didn’t give us much time. Just a moment or two. The Overseer was caught off guard and without magic. She fell to the ground.

  Zay and I didn’t need to talk, didn’t need to plan. We both broke the Shield spell and drew Impact with quick, clean strokes and heaved it at her with everything we had. Our spells joined, tangling into something more powerful than just Impact. It burned a path through the air and slammed into the Overseer.

  A shadow spread out over her body, protecting her from the spell. The Impact spell hissed like lava hitting the sea.

  The Overseer was bleeding from at least two bullet holes in her chest, but she was still breathing. And in a moment, Leander and Isabelle made sure she was standing again too.

  Lightning wicked down out of the sky. Her people at the gates channeling more magic.

  Not a lot of choices left. We either opened the wells to shut her people down and risked giving her a well to pull magic out of, or we somehow stopped her here and now.

  With a flick of her wrist, the lightning reached out and wrapped around her fingers.

  Lightning whipped up over the top of us. Because we weren’t the target.

  In the death of one second to the next, I knew who she was aiming at.

  Nola.

  She had shot the Overseer and was reloading. They were making sure she didn’t fire on them again.

  Nola screamed as lightning wrapped her in a crackling cocoon. Magic shook her like a limp doll, throwing the shotgun out of her hand and tossing her to the ground.

  “No!” Cody rushed to her side.

  “Nola!” I yelled.

  Zay and I ran to her.

  Just as I reached the van, just as Shame and Terric were hauling ass toward us, Zay spun.

  And pulled on every drop of magic in the air.

  Unleashing hell itself.

  His spell hit.

  The road broke in half, a sinkhole spreading out from just the other side of Shame’s boots and crumbling away like a hill of sand as it stretched out toward the Overseer. She slipped down into that fissure, and disappeared from sight in the dust and debris.

  “Fucking balls, Z,” Shame yelled, running for the van. “Warning next time.”

  I tripped, fell. Zay’s hand caught my arm just as I got one hand out to catch myself. That much magic was too much. Too damn much. My ears were ringing and my vision narrowed down to a single spot.

  “Nola,” I said. “Help Nola.”

  “We got her.” Zay pulled me up to my feet. I wasn’t steady, but the strength flowing through Zayvion to me meant I wasn’t going to pass out either.

  Cody and Terric were lifting Nola and carrying her into the van.

  “She’s breathing,” Terric said. “Burned. We need to get her to a hospital.”

  “Where’s Stone?” I asked.

  “Flew away,” Cody said.

  “We need to get out of here,” I said.

  Zay let go of me for a second and I felt like I’d just lost a couple of pints of blood. Then his arms were around me again and I put some effort into getting to the van.

  The world shook.

  Shame wiped blood away from his eyes and glanced over at the huge hole Zay had punched in the middle of the street. “Aw, piss.”

  “What?” Terric said.

  “Run,” Shame said. “It’s time to run.”

  Terric and Cody hurried to get Nola in the van and Zay practically lifted me up and shoved me in after her.

  “Drive, Flynn!” Zay yelled.

  Shame had the van in reverse before the side door shut. I was tossed against the window, and braced there while Zay wrestled the door shut.

  The van spun, rocked, then straightened. Shame floored it.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Shame’s gaze flicked to the rearview mirror.

  I turned, looked back over Terric and Cody, who were trying to keep Nola safely lying across the seat. She wasn’t just unconscious, she was burned. Very burned. Third degree. If we didn’t get her to a hospital, I didn’t know how long she had left.

  “Terric?” I said.

  He used Life magic. Used it a lot. Couldn’t he find enough magic in the city to help her?

  His hands glowed a soft white-green and he was whispering healing spells. I didn’t know where he was getting the magic, but thought whatever he was doing might be helping her. I didn’t know if it would be enough. He wasn’t a doctor. And there wasn’t much magic available.

  He kept glancing out the ripped-apart back doors of the van too.

  The Overseer was rising—no, not rising, flying—up out of the sinkhole. A column of darkness surrounded her, carrying her into the air. Wild lashes of magic filled the sky and arced down as if she were a storm rod built to channel magic.

  She was chanting. I could hear it inside my head, Leander and Isabelle’s voices snapping and grinding through a spell that I knew would be our deaths.

  All the warmth bled from the air. The van’s windows cracked with a layer of ice as the sky went black.

  “Z?” Shame said.

  Zay grabbed my hand, and I laced my fingers between his. “Hold on,” he said.

  I had no idea what he was going to do.

  Zayvion traced a spell and said one word.

  He tore open the wells. And the world.

  I didn’t know how he did it. Didn’t know that anyone could open the wells like that. But I saw a final flare of the glyphs that were worked into Zay’s skin flash, and burn away. Guardian of the gate. Maybe that was how he did it.

  I bit my lip to keep from screaming. Tasted blood. He had cast magic, a spell I could not fathom, and tripped all the spells we’d locked down the wells with, breaking them so he could access their magic.

  Leander and Isabelle’s spell closed down like a hand crushing the van.

  Shame hit the gas. The world slipped away.

  And suddenly everything was silent.

  We were falling. I covered my head, wondering where the cliff had come from.

  I hit my shoulder, the side of my face. Tasted more blood. I thought, for a moment, that we were upside down, tried to look out the window.

  There was no street, there was no world. We were speeding, over a hundred miles an hour through a gate. A gate Zay had opened.

  He yelled one word to close it again. I felt that spell rush outward. He hadn’t just closed one gate. He had closed all the other gates in the city in a massive implosion.

  Tires hit reality, gravity slammed into my chest. I thought I saw trees, buildings, grass. I thought I heard Shame swearing. Then an explosion of metal crushing and groaning filled my ears. And everything went black.

  Chapter Twenty

  Allison, you must wake up.

  I ignored Dad. I didn’t want to wake up. Waking up was a bad idea. As a matter of fact, I wanted to dig my way much, much deeper into sleep.

  You must wake. This time he gave me a shove.

  I snapped open my eyes and inhaled a hard, sharp breath that gave me just enough time to take inventory of how much of me was hurting. Easy answer—all of me.

  Use magic and it uses you back. And we had been using a lot of magic.

  I heard the ticking of a turn signal and tasted gasoline in the air. Everything flickered with orange light.

  Fire.

  Holy shit!

  I pushed up, yelped as my left wrist shot with pain. Broken. We were still in the van. What was left of it.

  Quick glance: Shame slumped against the steering wheel, Zay unconscious and tossed to one side. Behind me, Terric curled over Nola, shattered glass covering the back of his coat and everywhere else like tiny, perfect ice cubes reflecting the flames. Cody was thrown back behind the
seat, just his legs in clear view along the side of the seats.

  Stone, gone.

  I didn’t think we’d been out long, but had very little way to tell. We could have minutes or seconds before the gasoline exploded and killed us all.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Wake up! Come on. Shame, Terric, Cody, wake up!” I shook Zayvion’s side and he groaned. He pushed up on one arm, his head hanging. Blood dripped from his nose, his mouth. The ripple of his pain over mine made everything go dark for a minute.

  Ouch.

  “Out, out!” I said. I grabbed at Terric’s coat, tugged on him. He came to; Shame came to at the same time. They inhaled, held their breath and exhaled.

  Shame: “Jesus.”

  Terric: “Christ.”

  Somehow we were all moving. The side door was bashed in so badly it wouldn’t move no matter how much Zay yanked on it.

  Since my window was broken, I pushed myself up and out of it, holding my wrist to my chest. I mostly managed a controlled fall to my feet, then stumbled to the back of the van to open the remaining door.

  Shame got out of the passenger’s side door. The driver’s side was smashed in. He’d hit a tree. The tree was still standing.

  I pulled the crooked-hinged back door open, and Cody coughed and blinked up at me. “Nola?” He sounded lost, frightened, young.

  “She’s still with us. Can you walk?” I helped him out and Shame clambered in. Between he and Terric, they got Nola moved as gently as possible over the seat and out away from the van. Zayvion limped around from the passenger’s side door.

  He looked like hell. I couldn’t believe he was even conscious.

  I held my good hand out for him and helped as much as I could. It took me a bit before I realized we were walking on grass.

  Where the hell were we?

  I glanced around.

  “St. Johns?” I exhaled. “Why? We need a hospital. Nola needs a hospital.”

  “I was trying not to land us in a wall,” he panted. “Or a river.”

  “We hit a tree,” I said.

  “Shame hit the tree,” he said.

  Stone, Dad said. Where is the Animate?

  I don’t know. I hoped he was smart enough to get somewhere safe and far away from the Overseer. I was hoping he’d found someplace to hide.

  If Leander and Isabelle find him, they will use him against us.

  They’re already using magic and everything else in the city, including gravity, against us, I said. Stone won’t make that much of a difference. And he won’t get caught.