Divided by Magic

by Rebecca Danese

  I still haven’t figured out what it stands for, but the fact that the person that stabbed Federico has a knife that matches the Duke’s has been playing on my mind since then. I’ve pressed Ella for answers a few times, asking her what happened between in the time that I was kidnapped and then found her on the green, but she’s been tight lipped and almost dismissive about it.

  After what we’ve now started calling, ‘The Incident’, Miss Banks held good on her promise and whisked us away, cleaning us from the records for now. I imagine at some point she’ll be back though.

  We went to where Mumbe told us to go: a manor house in Hertfordshire belonging to David’s mother that is big enough to accommodate all of us. Jer, Lou, David and Mumbe, even Agnes manage to fit in without getting in each other’s hair. It feels more like a family than mine has ever been considering everything we’ve been through together, even if I try to avoid Agnes as much as possible.

  Everything was left behind though, and it’s taken some difficult telephone conversations with my Mum to explain why I’ve suddenly disappeared without a real explanation. Especially considering what day it is tomorrow. She also complained that I got a cat without asking her and now she has to feed it, but I feel slightly more comfortable knowing that there’s some kind of Augur-cat watching over them for the time being.

  Ella approaches me from behind and wraps a blanket around my shoulders before sitting down next to me and tucking her legs underneath her.

  She’s wearing a blue dress under her winter coat, probably way too cold for this time of year but it matches the colour of her eyes. I like it.

  Her blonde hair is loose, spilling down onto her shoulders and framing her pale face.

  She gives me a sympathetic smile and puts her hand in mine.

  "So, did we win?" I ask again, looking ahead rather than at her now.

  She’s silent for a while before sighing and leaning her head on my shoulder.

  "I think winning is kind of relative. When countries are at war there are always casualties on both sides, but someone always ends up being called the victor." She pulls up a blade of grass with her free hand and twirls it in her fingers. "But to answer your question, I think we did win, in some way at least. There’s a lot of work to do after Munday’s display, but I’m hoping that it will mean Augurs will be employed properly by the government rather than being pushed out. That’s going to take time, gaining people’s trust and effectively purging centuries of discrimination. But even Miss Banks wants me to help in the ATU as a start," she laughs, but there’s not much humour behind it.

  "And Munday?"

  "Prison. A special one just for him."

  I want to pump my fist in the air at the fact that he’s safely behind bars, but there’s no doubt that the Magic Circle are probably still in action, and there’s a lot more that needs doing to get rid of them. It’s my turn to sigh, and I clench her hand a little tighter in mine.

  "So, can we pretend to be a regular couple now, at least for a short while?" I ask her. She looks at me searchingly, I suppose wondering if that’s even at all possible.

  "I’d love that," she eventually replies.

  "Good, then I’ve got something for you," I say relieved, and pull something else out of my pocket. It’s a camera lens. A really expensive one that I had to order and have Jer go and collect from the local Post Office. It’s heavy, all metal and glass, and I place it in her delicate hand. She looks surprised, then delighted and finally confused.

  "But, my camera—" I interrupt her by handing her a package that I’ve been keeping hidden for a few days. I had to pull some serious strings and get my Mum to post it for me, but not before having her practically break and enter to retrieve it from Ella’s bedroom. Mum, normally an absolute saint, decided that because it was ‘all for love’ it was okay to bend the rules a little.

  Ella throws her arms around me, and I smile genuinely for the first time in weeks. She clicks her new lens onto the camera and puts it up to her eye, and instinctively I put my hand up to shield my face as she points it at me.

  "Oh, come on, Curtis! I need a picture of my favourite person," she slaps my hand away and focuses. I hear the definitive ‘clunk’ as the shutter button is pressed and then pull her towards me.

  "Merry Christmas," I say, and she gives me a sly grin.

  "Christmas is tomorrow, silly."

  "I know, but I couldn’t wait any longer." I hug her again, wrapping my arms and the blanket around her.

  "I have something for you too, but it’s not as good as yours, so be warned," she says mysteriously.

  "Oh, well when you put it like that it can probably wait until tomorrow," I joke.

  "No, no. You started it, so we’re swapping presents now, but I need to go and get it," she gets up and heads back towards the house, returning a few moments later with a small box in her hand. She sits back down next to me and hands it over like it’s hot. Intrigued, I peel back the plain wrapping to find a shiny new phone underneath.

  "Really? You got me a new phone?" I say, shocked.

  "Not really. I had your old one replaced for a small fee, but everything should be on there. Phone numbers, messages, the lot," she smiles. It’s my turn to hug her. I hadn’t missed having a phone much, but it makes it that much easier to stay in touch with Mum at the very least.

  I turn it on and watch the screen come to life. Within a few moments, it buzzes with incoming text messages and voicemails that I’ve missed over the past few weeks, and I feel unusually popular.

  "It’s probably going to be a lot of old messages from Mum asking where I am," I joke.

  "Well, that will keep you busy for a while."

  I pocket the phone and take her hand back in mine, happy to stare into the distance for a while and enjoy a moment where our lives aren’t being threatened. Today is the first day I’ve been off my sick bed, and I plan to make the most of being outside even if I freeze in the process. A couple of red kites fly overhead in circles, hunting for food I imagine. A squirrel runs up a nearby tree and everything seems calm for now.

  "So, what now?" I ask, eventually breaking the silence.

  "Now? You mean apart from figuring out our place in all of this madness and somehow piecing our lives back together?"

  "No, I mean right now. What do you want to do right now?"

  She frowns, a little crease in between her eyebrows. It’s cute.

  "Now, we kiss," she replies.

  And we do.

  ***

  EPILOGUE

  Curtis, this is Matthew Avers. Listen, I don’t know why you’re not picking up your phone, but I heard about what happened in Westminster. The official statement is that Munday was stopped by a brave group of Augurs and they saved hundreds, if not thousands, of Londoners in the process, but I have a feeling you may know more about it than anyone else.

  I’ve been reading the files you gave me. I count over two hundred case files in there, as well as at least fifty personnel files, but there’s one that doesn’t make any sense. It indicates that FADE were being funded by a private source, and I think whoever you got this from will have the missing data. The only thing that I’ve got is a letter with a crest on it giving permission to open the facility, but all the text is blanked out. It makes a reference to more documents and a large symbol, looks a bit like a ‘W’ printed on the bottom. That’s all I’ve got.

  I’m hoping you can help, so give me a call back as soon as you can. Thanks. Bye.

  Curtis & Ella will be back in

  Broken by Magic

  Read on for a bonus chapter…

  Ella

  I watch him sleep.

  Just as I’ve watched him these past few weeks, like a vigil. Even now that he’s nearly completely recovered I still monitor his breathing, the up and down of his chest, the little twitches of muscles and the stutter of his eyelids as he dreams. He looks so young. He is so young to have been dragged into my world. My crazy, insane life filled with monsters like Munda
y, with duplicitous leaders and Augurs that can do everything from heal to hurt, help or hinder.

  He murmurs something in his sleep and reaches out, his long fingers splaying on the pillow just next to my face, and my thoughts soften.

  I don’t know when I realised I was in love with him. Maybe it was that first night I stayed at his house, my body pressed against his as we slept in the single bed he grew up in. Or perhaps it was when he first told me he knew I was an Augur, not wanting the heaviness of the secret to get in the way of us being together. Certainly his consideration for me, what I might feel about him knowing, and his concern, made me recognise the sort of person he really was. Kind. Determined. And just the right amount of fight in him to see it all through.

  But really, I muse, as I listen to his breathing, I knew I wanted him from the moment he walked into the restaurant. Awkward and a little self-conscious, but with a spark in his eyes that had me thinking about him long after he’d left after the interview. I’d begged Mr. Gregorio to take him on. I wonder now what would have happened to us if I hadn’t been so convincing.

  Curtis turns over so that his back is to me, a small movement that he hasn’t been able to do for weeks.

  Something in my chest pulls when I think about him laying on the grass, staring up at me with vacant eyes, Munday’s blood all over his hands. That vision comes to me, unbidden, more often than I like to admit, especially when I try to sleep. That, and the hollow blackness of Munday’s eyes, the thick smog of his power trying to consume me, absorb my own.

  When I went to the Duke for help, begging him to get Curtis back from the ATU, I didn’t understand what he wanted from me.

  “Something far bigger than us is about to happen, my dear,” he’d said, Mulberry handing him his coat as the Rolls Royce pulled up outside his house. I hadn’t grasped what he meant, until we reached the green.

  Munday’s power had touched me, just for a second, and my whole body had felt infected, burning with poisoned blood. It had been instinct to fight the sucking, pulling feeling that was coming from that black cloud.

  I shiver and pull the blankets further over my shoulders, trying to push those thoughts out of my head while I stare at Curtis’s back. The faint red lines of healing magic are still there, but they gradually disappear as the days go on.

  For the weeks he was being healed by Beryl and David I was only allowed to sit by the bed for fear of undoing any of their work, so I savour curling up next to him on the crisp sheets watching the moonlight through the window play on his dark skin, turning it silver.

  There’s no chance of me sleeping, my mind too messy, my thoughts like moths around a naked bulb, never settling for more than a second before some other worry or horror comes to mind. Eventually I give up and slide out of bed, pulling on a borrowed robe.

  I leave the room as quietly as I can and pad down the thick carpeted corridor, knocking gently when I reach Agnes’s room.

  “Come in, Ella,” she says, softly. I roll my eyes. Of course she knew I was coming.

  “You’re awake?” I say as I close the door gently behind me.

  “I don’t sleep much these days,” she replies, sitting in a chair by the window with a blanket over her legs. She looks ancient, not like my older sister at all. Not because she’s wrinkled or aged, but her eyes are so dark, all the sky-blue that we share muted, hidden by the fact that they’re so deep in her skull.

  “Visions keeping you up?” I ask, pulling up a stool by her chair and leaning over so that my head rests on her shoulder. When we used to share a room as kids I’d often hear her tossing and turning, the nightmares of whatever future vision she’d seen forcing her awake. When we were really little she used to climb into Mum and Dad’s bed. When they were gone, she sometimes used to climb into mine for comfort, even if it was just to listen to me breathing while I slumbered.

  From this angle I can see her line of sight out of the window and across the garden to the hills beyond, illuminated by the stars and the pale full moon.

  “Mostly, yes. And guilt,” she says, putting a cold hand over my warm ones.

  “What on Earth could you feel guilty for, Aggie?” I ask, pulling away to study her weary face.

  “It’s not a sensation I’m all that familiar with, Ella, don’t make it worse by trying to deny me it.”

  I smile at her melodrama.

  “Of course, feel as guilty as you like, but at least tell me why you’re beating yourself up,” I joke. She scowls at the fact that I’m making fun of her, but she answers me anyway.

  “I wasn’t able to warn you.”

  “About Curtis getting hurt?” I swallow as the vision of him laying broken fills my mind again.

  “I tried to warn him about that. At least he didn’t die,” she retorts unsympathetically. “But about you having to take on Munday. I didn’t see what he really was,” she shakes her head.

  “Pfft, who cares that you didn’t warn me? It’s all over now, isn’t it?” I say giving her arm a gentle pat. Something in the way she stares at me makes me pause. “Isn’t it?” I ask, sensing that Agnes as more to confess.

  “Not even nearly, from what I can tell.”

  She doesn’t explain, doesn’t bother to clarify or elaborate, but it leaves me with a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  We sit in silence for several minutes, watching the moonlight play across the river in the distance, the shine of headlights on a road a few miles away. How many times have we sat like this since Mum and Dad died, together, but worlds apart in our own minds?

  “They’d like this place, don’t you think?” I say eventually, breaking the quiet.

  She smiles wanly. “Yes, I think they would. Beryl is a woman of excellent taste,” she says, adjusting the blanket on her knees so that it covers mine as well.

  We haven’t spoken much about Munday, the Facility or my parents since Curtis filled us in. The fact that the man of my nightmares has a face and a name, and that that face was all over television until not that long ago, isn’t lost on me. But every time I think about it I want to scream.

  My parents’ murderer has a name. If I had known before I faced off with him outside Parliament I would have killed him, I’m sure of it. And if knew where he was now I wouldn’t hesitate to hunt him down and end him.

  “No you wouldn’t,” Agnes interrupts my dark thoughts abruptly. I raise an eyebrow. Sometimes I wonder if she’s psychic too, but most of the time I think she’s just predicting conversations that haven’t happened yet.

  “I would, Aggie. I’d put an end to the pain and suffering he’s caused us.”

  “You wouldn’t, and you won’t do anything. Not for me, but for you, and that boy of yours that you’re so in love with,” she adds with a hint of bitterness.

  “Is this one of your riddles?” I ask, trying to wrap my head around what it is she’s getting at.

  She sighs impatiently.

  “Sometimes I wish you were born with the same ability as me, then at least our conversations would be faster,” she replies, but I know she’s joking. “What I mean is, you are not about to go and avenge Mum and Dad’s deaths by hunting down Carlton Munday and killing him. Not only do I think you aren’t capable of such brutality, but your lover boy would be heart broken if you ended up in prison.”

  I blink a few times in surprise. “Is that what you saw?” I ask, knowing that she never usually says things unless she means them.

  She wriggles uncomfortably under my gaze. “I’ve seen too much to tell you, Ella, but please do listen to me when I tell you, you have to let this go.”

  “How can you say that? After everything we’ve been through together?” I don’t understand how she can be so calm, so indifferent about our parent’s murderer. He didn’t kill them with his own hands, but just having kidnapped me, experimented on me and lured them to his facility… that’s enough to make him pay.

  “I have no choice but to accept it, Ella. You and I aren’t destined to end Mun
day’s life, and I won’t hear any more from you on the subject.” She uses her ‘telling off’ voice that she used to reserve for when I was in trouble. A tone that faintly echoes my father’s when I’d misbehaved. I hate it when she uses that.

  “Enjoy your time here with Curtis. Stay out of London, and out of trouble. For once, just be content and happy.” She puts a hand on my cheek and her expression softens. “You deserve it.”

  I take all the hate and anger for Munday, all the pain and heartbreak for my parents, and compact it. I force it down until it’s nothing but a tiny fiery ball of rage. And then I bury it.

  Maybe other people can’t do that; I feel sorry for them if that’s the case, but I’ve been able to control my emotions fairly well my entire life. I laugh, I cry, but if I need to steel myself and push it away I can. I sometimes wonder if it’s one of my abilities.

  “Have you seen something you aren’t telling me?” I ask her softly.

  She studies me, weighing up whether or not to answer as she usually does when I ask her about one of her visions.

  “I’ve seen so many things, half the time I don’t know if my abilities are trying to trick me. Telling you any of it will do us no good,” she says, once again bearing the burden of what she’s seen alone. “But I will say one thing,” she adds, her tone hardening, “you have to keep an eye on your boy.”

  “He has a name, Aggie,” I say irritably.

  “Either way, he’s going to get you into trouble,” she warns.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Oh, with him it’s anyone’s guess. He’s got a spark in him Ella. He won’t want to stay still for long.” She says it like it’s a bad thing, and I don’t want to tell her it’s one of the reasons I love him so much, so I just nod.

  A clock chimes midnight somewhere down the hall and it dawns on me what day it is.

  “Merry Christmas, Aggie,” I say giving her a peck on the cheek.