by Lucia Ashta
“You promised to give her the rest of the day,” Liana said, and I realized through a hazy mind that she spoke to Mulunu this time, not me. “You can’t kill her for defending herself.”
“I keep my promises, child,” Mulunu said, her voice as rough as my tattered emotions. “Besides, killing those men only revealed the extent of her powers, not the level of their danger.”
“I murdered five men just by thinking it.” I grimaced with self-disgust. “I blew them to pieces. You can’t even tell what parts of their bodies are what anymore.”
“That is correct,” Mulunu said. “You defended yourself and your friends.”
Was she suggesting we were friends? I couldn’t tell.
“Angels are so powerful that they do not descend to Earth. Your father might contain more magic than every magic wielder on this planet combined. We don’t know. The amount of power is not the issue. The ability to control it is, along with the heart of its wielder. I already know your heart, Selene. Your inherent goodness would be apparent to the blind and the deaf. It’s the only reason you’re still alive.”
I stared off into the distance, studying the outline of rolling hills and trees strong enough to withstand harsh winds. As if I were a guest in my own body, I wondered at myself, unable to grasp anything of substance beyond the death that infused every one of my senses. I’d caused death—lots of it.
“Now, no time to wallow,” Mulunu said, withdrawing her hand from my back. “A witch as powerful as Lizbeth is sure to have sensed the death of her minions. She’ll be sending more our way, or she’ll send another magical attack as she did when we first stepped foot onto the shore. She won’t wait.”
I nodded, but didn’t turn.
“You have to keep it together, girl,” the sea witch snapped. “Now is not the time to reflect on your actions. If you want to save Quinn, you need to hold yourself together.”
At that I finally turned. Liana took my hand in silent support.
“I thought you were planning on killing Quinn,” I said, still struggling to return from the heaviness of my conscience.
“I promised you I’d give you the chance to prove that Quinn deserves a stay of execution. You’re the only one who can give him that.”
“Okay,” I said, my voice still sounding foreign to my own ears. Liana squeezed my hand and I sensed her concern trailing across me like a cool breeze. I shivered.
“Selene of the Kunu Clan,” Mulunu ground out, “you are not weak, and you are not cruel. You are strong and you’ve used your powers only to defend yourself and those with you. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.”
But I stared at her, agog. “‘Of the Kunu Clan’?”
She rolled her milky, pupil-less eyes at me. “I never banished you from the clan. I sent you away to protect you from yourself. A person never loses their roots, not unless they let them go.”
Whatever that meant…
“Come on. We don’t have the luxury of gaping about with our mouths hanging open catching flies.” She tugged at my arm. “When you see Lizbeth, don’t hesitate to kill her if you can. Our one immediate job right now is to kill her before she can kill us. She’s already building another kill spell. I can feel it.”
Yeah, all of a sudden, I could feel it too. I nodded as if my head were on a swivel. I’d killed five already today, but the day was just beginning. If Mulunu was right, I had yet to discover the extent to which my magic would go to defend me.
The question remained, however: Who would defend me from myself? When I could create with nothing more than a thought and a hazy intention, was there anything safe or sacred left in this world? I couldn’t very well monitor every single thought I had; that was crazy making.
Still, as I followed Mulunu toward the stairwell, Liana trailing immediately behind me, that’s exactly what I attempted to do. I examined every single thought I had, until I officially became my own enemy, worried that I’d accidentally think something horrible and it would occur before I could stop it.
Have you ever tried not to think something? It very nearly guaranteed that you’d eventually break down and think it.
My untrustworthy subconscious held the lives of Quinn and Liana in the balance, two of the most important people to me in the whole world. All that needed to happen for me to extinguish them from existence was to accidentally fear that I couldn’t keep myself from thinking about the possibility of their demise.
If that wasn’t a mind warp, I didn’t know what was.
To keep my mind occupied, I studied the ground. One gray stone, two gray stones. A crack in the stone, and a dark stone staircase leading far below…
The stairwell was too quiet, the halls we emerged into too devoid of life, as if the centuries-old fortress were abandoned. If it hadn’t been for the tangible sensation of magic creeping along every surface, I might have doubted my instincts. As it was, I feared them, worrying how I might react to any threat.
Mulunu crept ahead of us, her back hunched, her footfalls muted so as not to disrupt the eerie stillness of our damp surroundings. The cold stone of the dark halls seemed to close in on us as we inched through the unfamiliar space, ears perked for the slightest indication of movement.
A roar tore through the hall, slamming into me like a veritable wall of rage.
I halted for a moment, pressing a hand to my heart to control its errant beating. The roar was manly, angry, filled with a promise of vengeance, and also somehow familiar. Even so, I wasn’t sure it was Quinn. I also wasn’t sure it wasn’t him. After what he’d suffered at the hands of Dimorelli’s goblins, the barely-human cry might have been his. He might have finally broken at the hands of his newest captor.
Mulunu proceeded with caution as she crept along, one hand skimming the wall for guidance, but I couldn’t continue at this pace. My pulse jumped through my veins, urging me forward—faster, faster, faster, dammit!
Beyond the point of questioning, I listened. Operating solely on instinct, I broke into a run, passing Mulunu to tear along one unfamiliar hall after another, taking turns too fast, recovering and speeding down the next open lane.
When I hurled myself into another stairwell, this one lighter and more open than the one leading down from the roof, I heard Mulunu and Liana right on my heels. Good, I didn’t want them out of reach, each for different reasons.
Another enraged roar swirled up the stairs, exciting my heart once more. This time, a violent, desperate clanging echoed through the fortress.
Awareness pricked across my flesh, making me feel like eyes pointed at my back, trailing my progress. I ran faster, trying to outrun the feeling. Mulunu’s and Liana’s bare feet slapped the stone behind me.
When another roar whisked through the building, it directed me another story down, until we were running beneath the ground. The darkness here was all-encompassing. Not a single torch was lit to illuminate the despair that dominated the inkwell. As if the dungeon were alive, the emotions of the desperate and dying caressed my flesh. I had to fight the urge to recoil. Unpleasant things happened here on a daily basis, and I didn’t need my magic to tell me that. I could feel the history of torture and cruel experimentation vibrating through the dank air.
A final roar swelled through the stale air and I skidded to a stop in front of a cell. I slammed against its cold bars before sensing who was inside.
A spark of light burst out of nowhere, and I had to squint to make out the source of the light that was blinding in the depths of such darkness. When my eyes finally adjusted, I blinked in shock.
“Selene, no,” the big, gruff man lamented, his frame half as stoic as it’d been when I’d last seen him. “You shouldn’t have come.”
He wrapped bloody knuckles around the bars and pressed his face most of the way between them. “It’s a trap,” he warned, unnecessarily—a witch held a ball of light in her hand just to the left of the cell.
Even so, with whom I presumed to be Lizbeth staring down at us with cold, assessing ey
es, I couldn’t look away.
Quinn’s Uncle Irving was alive.
5
Taking in the dark shadows of Irving’s face, the way his cheeks were sunken, his entire frame too thin for a man of his strength and size, I stared into his haunted eyes until the urgency within them snapped me from my shock. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but lost to the depths of his suffering it felt like a small eternity. He must have been here longer than Quinn had been a prisoner of the vampire.
“Thank you for delivering yourself to me after evading my previous attempts to capture you,” the witch said, her voice like the crisp crackle of flames.
“You didn’t attempt to capture us,” Mulunu snapped. “You tried to kill us.”
“You, yes. The useless mermaid, maybe. The sirangel...” The witch grinned, her dark desires sparking across wicked brown eyes. “Never. I have far better plans for her.”
Slender and rigid in her posture, the witch made the most of her average height. She flicked one of the many tight brown curls that framed her face, and actually licked her lips as she trailed a greedy gaze up and down my naked body.
She extended her smooth, unmarred hand. Though she was apparently nearly as ancient as Mulunu, she didn’t appear all that much older than Liana or me. “Come,” she ordered, sounding as if she actually expected me to comply.
“Don’t go anywhere with her,” Irving said urgently, and somewhat unnecessarily. The witch oozed darkness that spread across my being, prickling every one of my senses with desperation to evade her.
“Help.” A broken plea croaked through the dungeon and my breath hitched.
“That isn’t Quinn,” Irving said, understanding right away what I would think.
“Of course it isn’t Quinn,” said the brunette who was styled like it was still the 1700s. Even her dress with its long, floor-skimming skirts fit the era. “I’m not stupid enough to leave the bait sitting in the trap—not this bait anyway.”
She waved her hand at me. “Don’t make me wait.”
Mulunu edged between us, uncaring of her wild nakedness even when the other witch recoiled at it, sneering in disgust as if Mulunu were a savage whose uncouth ways might rub off on her.
Mulunu’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “I take it you are Lizbeth.”
“I am.” The brunette witch tilted her chin upward. “And you wouldn’t be who I think you are if you didn’t already know that.”
Mulunu lacked patience for flowery language. “This only ends in one of two ways. You give us Irving and Quinn and we leave without killing you, or you don’t give us Irving and Quinn and we wipe you from this plane and find them after.”
“I want you to release whatever other prisoners you have here too,” I added.
Lizbeth smiled like a prim and proper lady at an evening party, suggesting she wasn’t entirely sane. “My other prisoners aren’t your concern, and I just explained to you that Quinn isn’t here, which means that if you kill me, you’ll never find him.”
The witch was lying. I flicked a glance at Irving, looking for him to deny her statement. I felt Quinn here, somewhere within the fortress.
Irving shrugged as Liana pressed herself close to my back. He shook his head, his hair dirty and stringy beneath Lizbeth’s weak light. “I don’t know where Quinn is. I haven’t seen him since the witch brought him in.”
That reminded me...
“How did you find him?” I asked Lizbeth.
But instead of addressing me, Lizbeth faced Mulunu. “Your reputation precedes you, sea witch. Did you teach your little sirangel nothing of the ways of magic?” When Lizbeth looked me over this time, she tsked, disdain in her fake smile, making me hate her.
She’d called me sirangel...
Lizbeth huffed—in a ladylike manner, batting her eyelashes and tilting her head while she did so—and addressed me. “Quinn is oozing power, as are you. For a witch as powerful as I, it was child’s play to find you both. Which means there’s nowhere for you to run. There’s no place that you can hide where I won’t track you down.”
“I wasn’t planning on running or hiding,” I said, plastering my own fake smile on my face. “I’m planning on killing you and saving us all a lot of trouble.” My threat sounded foreign to my own ears, but I embraced it.
Arrogance widened her smile, spreading across her disturbingly placid face. “It would be a great shame if I had to kill you to protect myself. My plans for you are so much grander than a sad, swift end. People talk. I know all about how little control you have over your magic and how mild mannered you are. The fiercest sea witch to ever live has raised a harmless kitten. You’re no threat to me, you’re all bluster. You can’t beat me, no matter who your parents are.”
I chewed on my lip, debating whether or not she was bluffing. I sensed Quinn within the building, which meant that even if I killed her, I’d almost certainly eventually find him. It might take a little time, but with Mulunu’s help, surely she’d be able to see beyond any concealment spells or whatever protections Lizbeth might have in place.
Deciding to trust my instincts instead of the declarations of a snake, I allowed that one word to drift across my awareness.
Death.
I pictured the brunette disintegrating into small pieces just as her soldiers had minutes before.
She whipped her head toward me, hissed, and rounded Mulunu, stalking straight into my personal space. “How dare you try to kill me like that?” She vibrated with rage, her artificially tight curls shaking along with the rest of her. “You tried to kill me!” she accused, her voice a high, unladylike shriek.
“You tried to kill us first,” I said, shocked that she should be so outraged.
“I didn’t try to kill you,” she snapped, as if I were a petulant child who just wouldn’t listen. “I won’t be killing you, didn’t I just say that? I’ll be channeling your magic into my spells. Combined with Quinn’s, I’ll finally be able to harness the power of every single one of the elements. There will be no one strong enough to defeat me.”
She stalked another couple steps toward me until I had to press my palms against her chest to hold her back.
“You aren’t strong enough to beat me, and neither is Quinn.” A fine spray of unladylike spittle flew from her mouth, coating one of my cheeks. I resisted the urge to wipe it away, continuing to press her back.
“You come with me right this instant,” she said, “or I’ll vaporize Quinn into pieces so tiny he’ll disperse across the entire globe and you’ll never be rid of his memory—or his wretched stench.” Her upper lip curled as if she were already imagining the unpleasantness of Quinn clinging to her flesh through particles of air.
Meanwhile, I was scrambling to figure out what had gone wrong. I’d done nearly the same thing as with Lizbeth’s soldiers on the rooftop, and it didn’t even seem like my magic required all that much precision to begin with.
“Don’t even think about it, Mulunu,” Lizbeth cautioned, menace coating each of her words as she spit them out. “If you throw a kill spell at me, it will only rebound on you.”
Was that a thing? One quick glance at Mulunu, who’d drawn up short behind the brunette witch, suggested it was. The crone’s lips were pursed, the grip on her staff white-knuckled.
“I’ve lived in this castle for hundreds of years,” Lizbeth continued, never removing her attention from me, as if she didn’t consider Mulunu a real threat—which was crazy! “I’ve had all the time I needed to layer spell upon spell of protection.”
Lizbeth pressed her chest into my hands, pushing me, and Liana immediately behind me, back half a step. “Come now, or you will regret it, girl. I promise you that.”
I was pretty sure I’d regret if I did go with her. I was even more certain that I’d reached my maximum limit of tolerance for being kidnapped and held captive. There was no way I was going with her, no matter what she said. Quinn wouldn’t want me to be stupid, and despite what the witch said, I didn’t think she’d k
ill Quinn or me. She craved our power, whether to channel into her spells or claim for herself made little difference. Our value to her existed only while we were alive.
I made up my mind.
Death, I tried again, mentally projecting the witch’s death upon her form. When she growled and her nostrils flared, indicating that she’d detected my intentions, I didn’t falter. I closed my eyes and sent more energy than before to the picture I was creating.
Within my mind’s eye, I saw her crumpling to the floor as my magic overpowered her own.
“It’s not possible,” she protested, her words reaching into the vision I was working to create. “I’ve built defenses against every type of magic.”
But wasn’t that the whole point? There was no magic quite like my own.
I delivered more energy toward the image I was creating. I envisioned the witch writhing on the filthy stone floor of her dungeon.
“You can’t,” she complained another time. No…” But this time her words were choppy and garbled, like she’d guzzled a couple of bottles of wine all by herself.
I renewed my efforts, pushing forcibly through her protections. A witch of Mulunu’s skill would have been able to understand what I was barreling through. But for me, instead of layer after layer of complex spells, all I sensed was combative energy, and when it fought me, I fought back.
Dead, dead, dead!
Clenching my jaw, sweat beaded at my hairline as I envisioned my magic like a fist wrapping around her body. I squeezed so intensely that the bead of sweat broke free to trail a line down my face. I pictured the prim and proper witch losing the veneer of her civilized appearance as my magic dug beneath it, reaching for her life essence and tearing it from her physical body.
When a gurgle punctuated the rank air, I finally released my hold over the witch. Liana wove her fingers through my hair in solidarity as I opened my eyes and we both leaned forward to see. Only, it was dark. Lizbeth had extinguished her magical light.