Twisted Souls: Twisted Magic Book Three

by Rainy Kaye

  The last idea marched up for inspection: wait for an opening as the ritual progressed. If no opening came, at the last minute, I would run. Just run. I would take everything else from there.

  It was a terrible plan. Gangly. Malnourished. It wanted to go back home, but here it was, trying to put on a brave face as it turned to confront the enemy head on, alone.

  I had nothing else.

  Trees sprung up on either side of the truck as we reached the base of the mountain, and they grew closer together the farther we went. Soon, we were lost in the middle of a forest. Snow covered the ground and tree branches. A few icicles dangled from twigs.

  The tires crunched as the driver pulled the truck to a stop. She opened her door and dropped to the ground. I expected her to come around to my side, but she headed off into the distance.

  Run. Now.

  I turned, shoving open my door. The man in black and mustache stood just outside the truck. I yelped, jerking backwards. They reached into the cab and grabbed my arms, hoisting me out and onto my feet.

  The cold swept through my hair and under my dress. I rubbed my hands together, trying to generate some warmth, but my body racked with shivers. My feet burned, and I realized they were bare. I cringed with each step, the snow and ice sinking up around my toes.

  The men guided me deeper into the forest. Tears pricked at my eyes, and I couldn’t tune out the numbing pain driving deeper into my feet. The agony rolled up to my ankles and then stretched up my calves. My knees buckled, but the men caught me between them and forced me onward.

  I whimpered, but the sound was caught by the respirator. I wanted to rip off that damn thing. It was suffocating me.

  But there was a plague. The bodies on the ground supported the claim. It wasn’t worth the risk, if not for my own life but for any hope left of getting back to Fiona.

  And Randall. I had left my two closest friends in the midst of a magical apocalypse. They didn’t have a fighting chance. Hell, I was the witch among us, and I barely had any hope.

  Sasmita would save them. She was stronger than me, better than me. My heart nearly ripped open at the thought, but it was true. Randall and Fiona needed her more than they needed me right now, if not for anything else but practical reasons. She could do them better than I had.

  The tears streaking down my cheeks were no longer just from the snow biting at my feet. By comparison, I barely felt it anymore.

  We came to a stop among the trees. There wasn’t even a clearing. A dozen people stood around, some talking, most of them waiting.

  Faces turned to me, perking up. From the distance, Nancy and her husband approached. Fog swirled around them, like they had practiced their entrance.

  I stood stock still between the two men who had escorted me here.

  Nancy and her husband came to a stop.

  “Bring her,” Nancy said, indicating at her feet.

  Mustache man shoved me toward her. I stumbled a few steps, and then caught my balance on the snow and ambled forward.

  As I scanned the peripheral, looking for my opening to run, realization settled hard in my stomach. It didn’t matter—there was no way I would make it far on bare feet. I could barely feel them now as it was, and when I did have any sensation, it was sharp pain that only seemed to be increasing in severity with each jolt.

  I would wager this wasn’t by accident. They had calculated this ritual. The plan, I presume, had been made for Madison. I had been subbed in on her behalf, a trade meant to spare her.

  “On your knees,” Nancy said, her voice loud and clear in the stillness of the snow-coated forest.

  I did as she said, not because I feared her, but because it brought some relief to my feet.

  Some.

  She grabbed my head by my hair and yanked it back, peering down in my eyes. I breathed out heavily through the mask.

  “The Lord has sent you as our weapon against Satan. He has commanded us, and we will obey Him. You should feel honored,” she said, and her eyes crinkled with a smile. “Not everyone gets to give their life for Him.”

  I balled my fists at my side. Not that I didn’t expect they were planning something crazy, not that I didn’t think it might involve bodily harm, or death, but the way she said it goaded me with rage, like I was to accept and even embrace her plan?

  I had already made a sacrifice. I had picked up in Joseph Stone’s stead, when I could have been protecting my friends, protecting myself. I was losing everything—my home, Fiona, Randall. Who was she to insist on me giving an oblation?

  Anger welled up in my chest. I tried to clamp it down.

  Stepping around me, she yanked me down to the ground by my hair. The anger erupted through me, dark bubbling hatred. I tried to twist free, but several shadows of people wrestled over me, fighting me to the ground. I couldn’t see, couldn’t think. No openings had come.

  Now it was just time to fight.

  My arms were brought up and pinned over my head by two men, one on either side. I kicked my feet but fingers gripped my ankles and pulled my legs straight, fixing me in a star on the ground. I arched my back, screaming, but they held me fast.

  Snow melted against my dress, turning it wet and cold. The backs of my thighs iced over. My chest seized. I let out a long howl until I had no more air. I couldn’t breathe. Randall was wrong.

  The woman stepped beside me, obsidian blade in hand. The handle was carved with Mayan motif.

  She seemed to have her religions crossed.

  The coldness wrapped around the side of my head. It crept down my shoulders, along my side. My stomach clenched. I was being consumed.

  The woman spoke, but her words were drowned out by the sound of my panting through the respirator, of my heart thudding in my ears. The world faded out.

  I did nothing to try to bring it back.

  The snow crunched. The sound was distinct, as if it were the only noise in the forest, despite the madness occurring inside and around me.

  Dazed, barely able to find my body, I rolled my head to the side.

  Just beyond the people, among the trees, stood a tall figure. He wore a dark cape with a hood, and a mask different than the respirators. It had a long, jutting beak and eyes like round windows.

  A plague mask.

  The being cocked his head to look at me.

  It was him. He was the mage I had come here to seal away.

  My body tingled, starting from my spine.

  My magic was back. Not that it would do me much good. I had a few good tricks up my sleeves, as it turned out, but I could never find most of them when I needed them. I was still just heating up coffee and leaving breadcrumbs.

  Kind of.

  There was more in me. That much had been discovered, even if I didn’t understand it. I might not know how to pull off everything yet, but I still had my old standbys.

  Maybe I could just wiggle them around a little.

  I closed my eyes, blocking out the mage in the woods, and focused on sucking up magic. As I did, I let it flow down my arms, to my hands, like I had done a thousand times before.

  This time, I didn’t stop there. I kept filling my hands with heat, but I didn’t try to contain it like I had when I defeated Winston. Instead, I continued like I was going to warm up my coffee, letting it out as it came, but I pumped in more and more. The heat poured in, faster and hotter, rushing down my arms and through my body. With a sudden burst, I was on fire, a smoldering burning ember in the forest of snow.

  I couldn’t see. The world was blocked out by a glare of heat that had to be my own.

  Voices around me screamed. My body was freed.

  I twisted around and pushed off the ground, blind but this was my only moment. I took off through the trees, heat rolling off me. I didn’t know where I was going. It was away from these people, and that was enough right now.

  Sweat pooled under my arms and dribbled down my back. As I ran, I willed the heat to extinguish. It began to fade, little by little until I was me aga
in.

  The world came back into view. I was racing-stumbling through the trees. Somehow, no one was behind me. I expected to hear the truck or jeep crunching along any moment now, but it never came.

  I continued to run. I would find my direction when I could bring myself to stop long enough to think.

  Snow nipped at my feet, worse than before. The pain shot through my legs, and I faltered. Maybe I had escaped the ritual, but I was in the exact situation I had feared: I couldn’t keep running on bare feet, not through the snow and ice and plummeting temperatures. I was going to have to stop and try to find a way to insulate them. It would be time and energy I didn’t have to waste.

  The next jolt sent me to my knees. I cried out, and then bit down on my tongue to silence myself. I didn’t want anyone to hear where I was.

  Swallowing whimpers, I crawled on hands and knees through the snow, but it wasn’t much better. My fingers and legs couldn’t take the relentless cold either. I tried stopping to rub them warm every few minutes, but it only served to slow me down.

  With a low growl, I welled heat in my hands again. The snow sizzled as it melted under my palms.

  A tired smile eased onto my lips. I could make this work. Somehow.

  Against my better judgment, I halted, hanging my head, and closed my eyes. The fire in my hands inched up my arms, across my shoulders, and slid down my back. I willed it a little farther, through my hips, past my knees, and let it slip down my calves and into my feet. There, it burned brightly inside me.

  I pushed myself to standing. The snow hissed under my feet. Satisfaction filled my chest as I took a tentative step forward, and then another. Each one, the snow gave way, and my feet remained warm with their own little fires that I stoked with pulses of magic.

  On an espial map, my dot wouldn’t be blinking.

  Once I was steady on my feet, I turned my attention to trying to pinpoint where I was as I continued to clomp through the forest. Steam swirled around the hem of my dress.

  I had no idea which direction to go. The longer I walked, the more it all began to look the same. It seemed the trees stretched out forever.

  I just had to keep walking in the same direction. That would be my only hope of finding the end of the forest.

  A twig snapped behind me.

  I sucked in a breath, turning.

  The man with the plague mask stood a few feet away, staring at me.

  I stumbled backwards, putting up one hand.

  He swung out his arm, and blue magic erupted from his fingertips. I swiped my hand up, and a thin shield sprang to life as his magic collided with it. The jolt shot through me and I slammed into a tree. I dropped to the ground.

  He stormed toward me. My shield was gone, as much as it had been. Before I could stand, he loomed over me. My lungs froze, my heart icing over. He bent down and pulled me to my feet by the front of my dress. My soles barely touched the snow, singeing the surface.

  Pain rolled through my abdomen, and I thought I might be sick.

  He tilted his head forward, his dark eyes peering at me through the portholes of his mask.

  Did he know why I was here? That I had come to fight him?

  My consciousness waned.

  He’s got me. He’s got me and he knows I came to put him back in his prison. He’s going to end me now.

  He released his hold on me. I crumpled back at the base of the tree. My torso swayed and then fell forward, my head inches from the ground.

  His tall black boots crunched over the snow as he strolled away.

  I couldn’t determine what had happened. My side felt like it had been torn open. I stuck my hand to my ribs but didn’t feel any blood. Whatever damage his magic had done, it must be internal.

  With the last energy I could find, I turned and began to crawl away. I couldn’t stand anymore. My magic came in bursts, warming my hands and feet, but then it would die out again. My vision dimmed, like my mask was fogging up, but my chest was emptying of all sensation. I was about to pass out. My head lolled and then snapped up and then lolled again.

  Brightness flared to the edge of my vision, just enough to beat back the darkness. I veered toward it, unthinking. There were voices.

  I sensed a campfire. People.

  Silently, I prayed they were the last good humans on earth right before I fell forward into nothingness.

  6

  When I woke, I found myself propped upright against something that bowed behind me, a burning lantern nearby as my only source of light. My wrists were tied together.

  “Son of a bitch,” I muttered.

  I would have counted how many times, in the last week, I had passed out, been knocked out, or had become otherwise incapacitated only to find myself in a new, awful situation when I opened my eyes, except I couldn’t manage basic addition. My brain pulsed a deep sickening song through my entire body.

  I blinked to clear my vision and made out the inside canvas walls of a tent. Several sleeping bags were piled in a crumpled heap across from me. A few open crates of canned food sat next to them, leaving barely enough room for me and the lantern.

  After inhaling through my nose a few times to help clear the nausea—it didn’t work—I rocked myself forward, onto my knees. I shuffled a few inches toward the lantern.

  A woman with dark skin and hair swept back in a practical bun, and a respirator obscuring most of her face, peered through the tent doorway flap.

  I jerked back, nearly knocking over the lantern, but she sprung inside and caught it before we all became toasted marshmallows. Righting the lantern, she looked at me, and then down at my wrists.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said, but didn’t move any closer. “It’s just…you were kind of sparking like a firecracker and we…we didn’t really know what to do with you.”

  “So, your go-to move was to hogtie me?” I snapped.

  She winced. “That’s not really hog tying…”

  “Are we really debating the semantics of what style of restraint you are using on me?” I waved my bound wrists at her. “Cut them. Now.”

  “Yeah, of course…” She hesitated, and then stooped to pull a knife from the sheath around her ankle that I had not noticed until right just then. “Hold them up and out, please.”

  I extended my arms, and she picked the tip of the knife at one of the strands of rope and began sawing at it. After a harrowing moment, it popped free. She started on the next.

  I looked away so I wouldn’t have to see when she inevitably accidentally nicked a vein in my wrist.

  “Why did you mean, sparking?” I asked as she jostled around my arms.

  She paused before continuing to work on my ropes. “You’re a witch, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess…I certainly feel like a house was dropped on me.”

  She nodded. “What happened out there?”

  Before I could reply, she tugged the last of the rope and my wrists fell free.

  I rubbed them where they had begun to chafe as I settled back on the floor of the tent. “There’s this thing out in the woods. He’s—”

  She mimed the beak of the mask. “Him? Yeah, he’s been…He’s been a delight.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What do you know about him?”

  “He just showed up one day, and people started dropping dead.” She returned her knife to its sheath. “A local lab determined it was a virus, airborne, but nothing they could identify. It behaves so strangely, they debated if it should be classified as a virus at all, but then all three scientists died and that ended that discussion. These”—she motioned toward her respirator—“became quite the fashion statement. You could probably add cute little cat ears to them and make a fortune.”

  I stared up at her.

  “Yeah, look, if you take the idea, just cut me in.” She chuckled, sitting down near me. She folded up her legs in the cramped space. “After he made his appearance, the town went a little bit nuts. Most of us just wanted to survive, but then New Hope of Haven Rock, they kind of had so
me other ideas.”

  My body tensed. “That’s the church up on the cliff, I guess?”

  “Lovely folk who think they just need to wash away the sins of the town, and the…thing…” She indicated a beak again. “They think he’s a punishment from God and some other nonsense.”

  “Yeah, I gathered that.” I hesitated. I didn’t have much to lose trusting her. “They tried to kill me. When I escaped, that mage in the woods hit me pretty hard.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” she said. “He’s killed a few people himself, but mostly it has been his plague. At least, I assume it’s his plague, given the attire and the fact people reported sightings of him shortly after the mist.”

  “Yeah, I’ve no doubt it’s him,” I said, debating my words. I didn’t want to tell her what I was up to yet, though I had to wonder if I was more afraid of him hearing, somehow, than what she would do. Or maybe I didn’t want to talk about it while I was still empty handed. I didn’t even know where his portrait was, yet. “So what about you? Just decided to sit it out? See which team is winning before you start rooting for anyone?”

  “Kinda.” She shifted in her spot. “Thanks to the strategic geography of our great town, there’s no way out.”

  I raised my eyebrow, though I wasn’t sure she could see in the dim glow.

  “Care to elaborate?” I prodded.

  “Past the lake is just miles of mountains, and a long ways before anyone can help us, but not a single road,” she said. “One the one side, there’s the mountain peak and farther down a drop. On the other side, it’s just a vertical rock side and nothing else. There’s really only one practical way in and out of the town, and in that direction—”

  “There’s a monster,” I finished for her.

  She nodded. “Yeah. We’ve done some research on how to kill it, but as far as we can tell, that’s pretty risky.”

  “Where the hell did it come from?” I asked, more to myself than to her. I wasn’t sure I expected her to have even as many answers as she had so far.