by Ella Summers
“They’ve been watching our town!”
“Spying on us!”
“Following us.”
“Hardly.” Damiel coolly considered the red-coated woman who was pointing a gun at us. “You followed us here.”
“They might be here to test a new weapon on us,” the woman in blue said to the woman in red.
“Let’s not lose our heads,” said a young man with a smooth, bald head. Dressed in a long, fur-trimmed robe, he looked like a priest. “They have not done anything threatening yet.”
“They are here, at our sacred temple, Illias,” snapped the blue woman. “They’ve clearly come to steal our treasures!”
The crowd—or perhaps mob would have been more accurate—erupted into angry jeers. Several people drew their guns. One of those people fired.
Damiel and I moved to defend ourselves. Magic flared up on our hands.
The villagers grew wilder.
“See the glow on their hands!” shouted the woman in red.
“They are Casters!”
“Warmongers!”
“Aggressors!”
Snow began to fall lightly from the sky.
“You see,” said the woman in blue to the priest named Illias. “They have come to pillage. They’ve come to defy our holy temple!”
The young priest frowned. He waved his hand. “Apprehend them.”
Damiel calmly watched the restless crowd. “I believe it would be best to extricate ourselves from this situation. At least for now,” he said quietly to me.
I nodded. These people were out for blood. Even the priest, the mob’s voice of reason, had turned on us the moment we’d shown our magic. We might have been able to talk our way out before, but now we had no choice but to fight our way out.
Another shot fired. Damiel blasted the bullet with his psychic magic, shredding it apart.
I hurled a lightning bolt at a man who was about to shoot us. But the lightning bolt didn’t hit its mark. The man opened his arms wide and grabbed the bolt, pushing it into his chest. His whole body flashed bright gold, then he opened his mouth and spat my spell back at me.
“They are eating our magic,” Damiel said.
Eating indeed. I tried a few different spells. A fairy curse. A few vials of potions. I even tried shifting one of the angry villagers into a tree. But nothing worked. They devoured any and all varieties of magic I shot at them.
Nothing either Damiel or I did worked against these people. Theirs was magic unlike anything I had ever seen—or knew existed. Sure, I was resistant to magic, but I could not absorb it and shoot it back at someone who’d cast a spell at me. Not like these Magic Eaters.
The blue lady sneered at us. “How weak you are without your pack.”
Pack? What did that mean? I glanced at Damiel. He shook his head. Clearly, he didn’t have any idea what the woman was talking about either.
A pack often meant shapeshifters. The Magic Eaters might think we’re shifters. But why would they? We’d used other kinds of magic as well.
A red woman’s whip snapped like an exploding firework. I jumped aside to evade the lash, but my back grazed one of the Magic Eaters’ recycled spells. My skin grew numb, my movements slow. Gods, this was annoying. Anything we sent at them, they only used against us.
Damiel roared. I pivoted around. Two Magic Eaters had wrapped their whips around his arms. Gold sparks sizzled up and down the braided ropes. Damiel was motionless, frozen.
I drew my sword and swung it. A whip captured my blade. Another snapped around my leg. It burned like hot steel against blistered flesh. And now I was frozen in place too. The whip countered my every move. I grew lightheaded, dizzy. It was draining my magic.
The Magic Eaters pulled on the whips, dragging us down the snowy forest trail into town, all the while chanting and singing. People emerged from their houses. The mob was riling up the town.
“We need to get out of here,” I said to Damiel.
A low mutter was all I could muster. I could hardly move my lips. The whips had frozen our bodies as well as our magic.
The townspeople had grabbed burning torches. I hoped they weren’t planning on throwing us on a bonfire. Usually, we were fireproof, at least against mundane fire. But without our magic, we’d burn as surely as someone who was completely human.
18
Magic Cross
The Magic Eaters didn’t burn us alive, mainly thanks to the bald priest in the fur-trimmed robe. He was the voice of reason in the emotionally-charged mob. Luckily, everyone seemed to respect Illias, even though he was so young.
So instead of meeting a fiery end, we were imprisoned. Illias brought us to the village’s jailhouse. It boasted of only one prison cell, and Damiel and I were now sharing it.
After locking us up, the priest went back outside, hopefully to quell the crowd. We weren’t out of the woods yet. We might still end up on the bonfire.
Damiel and I set out to mastermind our escape. The good news was the townspeople had taken their magic-eating whips with them. The bad news was that didn’t help us one bit. The bars on our cell absorbed our magic just as surely as the people and their whips.
“I’m seeing a recurring pattern,” I told Damiel.
He leaned in closer to the bars to take a look at their composition. “Oh?”
“Yes,” I said. “Every time I go on a mission with you, I inevitably find myself inside a prison cell.”
“True.”
He frowned at the bars, then turned around and started walking toward me. His aura filled up the tiny space. We couldn’t extend our magic beyond the bars, but it was working just fine inside this cell. The air was crackling from the friction of our combined angelic power.
I cleared my throat. “We’re in a prison cell. Again. Do you think this might be the universe’s way of trying to tell me something?”
“Perhaps.” Amusement, silver and bright, flashed in his blue eyes.
“This is serious, Damiel. Those people want to burn us alive.”
“We’ll find a way out of this.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Faith.”
“And?” There was more. Damiel Dragonsire didn’t operate on faith alone.
“And experience,” he replied with a dry chuckle. “I’ve found my way out of many perilous situations.”
“This is different. This time we can’t use our magic.”
“There’s more to being an angel than magic.”
“Magic,” I repeated. “These people went berserk when they saw our magic. I wonder why. Clearly, they can handle our magic. It doesn’t seem to have any effect on them. Their own magic eats our spells, then uses our own magical energy against us. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“In the old tales, there are a few fragmented references to the Land of the Magic Eaters, a mysterious, terrible place. Perhaps that’s what this place is.”
“What do the tales say about the Magic Eaters?” I asked.
“Nothing that would help us here. Their powers were not recounted in any detail. They were merely described as ‘powerful’ and ‘evil’. Until this day, I’d never believed those vague stories of the Magic Eaters.”
“They are powerful. I’m not sure about evil, though I’m not overly fond of anyone who wants to kill me,” I said. “They seem to think that we are the evil ones. Something about us scares them. But why fear our magic when it is no threat to them?”
Damiel shook his head. “I do not know. Perhaps angels are the villains of the Magic Eaters’ theology.”
A high-pitched, girly giggle rippled in from the front room. A teenage girl, around fifteen or sixteen, dressed in fur-trimmed suede boots over wool tights and a plaid skirt, sauntered into our room of a single cell. Her black hair was braided across the top of her head like a headband, then wrapped around two large, flat buns, one on each side of her head. Her winter jacket hung open and unbuttoned, revealing the red sweater underneath. Her scarf was open, the two ends
dangling across her chest.
I hadn’t seen the girl when we’d been dragged through the front room on our journey into this cell. The young priest must have sent her here to watch us in the very high likelihood that we tried to escape. Since she was only a teenage girl, Illias must have been reasonably sure we wouldn’t succeed in that attempt. No, make that very confident. He hadn’t even bothered to take our weapons before throwing us in here.
The girl leaned against the doorframe. “You’re not from around here.”
“We came from another world,” I told her.
“Obviously.” Her tongue took a long, savoring lick of her lollipop. It smelled like strawberries and cream; nice to know some flavors were universal. “But you’re not from that world like they think you are.”
“Which world do they think we come from?” I asked.
She took another lick of her lollipop instead of answering my question.
I tried again. “How does your magic work?”
“I don’t believe anyone truly understands how magic works. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be very magical, now would it?”
Her words were at once both very frivolous and very deep.
“On our world, supernaturals can wield all kinds of powers,” I said. “But we’ve never seen anything like this…this magic-eating.”
“Magic Eaters, you call them?” She giggled. “It’s as apt a description as any. We call them ‘mermaids’.”
I blinked. That didn’t make any sense. Mermaids were mythical creatures that lived deep under the sea, with the torso of a person and the tail of a fish. None of the people here had tails. They looked just like we did.
“Mermaids are resistant to magic,” the girl continued. “Another name for them is ‘Spell Breakers’. You have to hit them with a lot of spells before they go down.” She glanced at me, her mouth curling into a smile. “Sound familiar?”
“How did you—”
“I was hiding in the woods, watching your battle from behind a tree. I saw them bounce your spells back at you, and you absorbed most of them. That’s the next step, by the way. Spell Breakers first learn to resist spells, then they learn to absorb them. They use the magic of those absorbed spells to power their own magic. They feed on those spells, like a baby feeds on its mother’s milk. Some Spell Breakers can bounce spells back at the casters. The best of the best can unravel the filaments of a spell and reshape it into something else, something completely different. Those are the Masters.”
“Are there any Masters here?” Damiel asked her.
He was ever the pragmatist, assessing the strength of our enemies, the threats around us.
“There are a few Masters on Nightingale.”
“Nightingale?” I asked.
“What we call this world,” the girl replied, smiling. “Spell-breaking is a skill that requires a lot of natural talent and years of study to master.” She looked at me. “You’re not there yet. But you could be. You have the potential.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“You have a certain glow about you.”
“I am an angel. We often glow.”
“This is different.” Her gold eyes turned on Damiel. “You have it too. But it’s different with you. You’re a unicorn.”
So I was a mermaid, and Damiel was a unicorn. We were a regular pair of mythical creatures.
“What did you call me?” Damiel said coolly.
I almost laughed. I bet no one had ever had the gall to call the Master Interrogator a unicorn.
“That’s what we call them: unicorns. Commonly known as Hunters,” said the girl. “We don’t have them here, but there is a world of Hunters. They can sense magic, follow magic breadcrumbs, using that to track people. Some Hunters can read so deeply into another person’s magic that they see into their soul, into the fabric of magic that makes them what they are—and all the events that led to their creation.”
Well, Damiel did have a reputation for being able to track down anyone. It’s one reason he was the Master Interrogator. One reason Nyx sent him to hunt down traitors.
“Did you observe Damiel’s powers in the battle too?” I asked the girl.
“Yes. He very quickly tracked the course of the bounced spells and evaded them before they could hit him.”
I looked at Damiel. “Have you ever heard of Spell Breakers or Hunters?”
“Not by those names. But some of the abilities are familiar.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
The gods’ Nectar bestowed many powers upon soldiers in the Legion of Angels.
First, we acquired the strength, stamina, and speed of the vampire, as well as the vampire’s ability to heal by drinking the blood of another.
With the second sip of Nectar came the potion-making and technology-tinkering powers of the witch.
Then we gained the compulsion of the siren, the power to influence others, to compel them to do as you commanded.
Next, we mastered the four elemental powers of fire, earth, sea, and sky—together called Dragon’s Storm. Dragon was a name of another mythical creature. Just as the Spell Breakers were sometimes called mermaids and the Hunters unicorns, we too had a few unusual names for our magic abilities.
After Dragon’s Storm was Shifter’s Shadow. The Legion’s fifth level came with the power to change our physical appearance, to create powerful illusions and tricks.
That was followed by the Legion’s sixth level, Psychic’s Spell, the power of telekinesis. The ability to move objects with your mind.
The seventh power we obtained was Fairy’s Touch, the power of healing—and, conversely, of curses and plagues.
After that, we became angels. We gained the power of flight. At the same time, all of our existing magical abilities received an enormous power boost.
A second-level angel gained the power of telepathy, to read thoughts. That particular power had given me a lot of grief on the Sienna Sea, when it came to Damiel reading my thoughts.
And then we became archangels. The promotion to the Legion’s tenth level was unlike those that came before it. An archangel gained unique, individual powers. It was different with every archangel.
“Yes, it does sound familiar,” I said again.
Archangels gained powers a lot like those of a Spell Breaker or a Hunter, or something else special. Those ‘special’ powers for us were normal here. Granted I’d never seen a magic-resistant archangel refold magic, just as I’d never met a magic-tracking archangel with the power to see into someone’s soul—but maybe those archangels could expand their powers with the proper training.
“There are other powers like these, aren’t there?” I asked the girl. “Such as the power to infuse magic permanently into artifacts and weapons.”
That was one I knew some archangels possessed. Sure, a decent elemental could cast a spell on a weapon, and it would even hold for some time. But it would eventually run out. Our fire swords and lightning whips only worked for so long before they needed to be recharged. That’s why a Legion soldier who could cast those spells on their own weapon was a more effective fighter. There were no spell-recharging stations for weapons in the midst of battle.
“Yes, that is another ability,” the girl confirmed. “A Magic Artist, a person with the power to infuse permanent magic power into a weapon. Sometimes called an elf.”
Somehow, I doubted these elves had pointy ears like in the children’s tales.
“These other powers she’s describing, they are ones the archangels acquire,” I said to Damiel.
Archangels generally got one or two of these special abilities. The older they got, the more special powers they acquired.
“But here’s the thing. Neither you nor I is an archangel,” I said to Damiel. “So where did you get your Hunter ability? And where did I get my Spell Breaker powers?”
“That is a good question.” He frowned. “One to which I have no answer.”
I glanced at the girl. She was smiling at us—a big, wide smile, ac
companied by big, wide eyes. It was kind of creepy, to be honest.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
Maybe if she had a name, she wouldn’t seem so creepy.
“Faith.” Her smile persisted.
And, no, a name hadn’t made her any less creepy.
“I am Cadence. And this is Damiel.”
Her smile grew wider. Her eyes too. Giving her our names hadn’t helped alleviate the creepiness factor either.
“These powers you describe, they are all kinds of indirect magic,” Damiel told me.
“Indirect magic?”
“Yes,” he said. “When it comes to indirect magic, you don’t cast a spell directly. You absorb a spell, or you redirect an already-cast spell. You follow the trail of someone’s magic. You reshape magic, funneling existing magic, infusing it into an artifact.”
“You’re pretty smart, you know,” Faith said, clearly surprised.
He folded his arms over his chest. “Yes. I know.”
“So he’s right?” I asked Faith.
She nodded. “Yes, he’s right. Hunters, Spell Breakers, Magic Artists—these are all forms of indirect magic. Passive magic. Just as the power of the vampire, witch, siren, elemental, shifter, psychic, fairy, and telepath are forms of direct magic. Or active magic. Active magic has two sides, light and dark; each is simply the same kind of magic, the flip side, powered by either light or dark. Passive magic has those two sides—light and dark—as well.”
She pulled a notepad out of her jacket, drew a few things on it, then showed us the page.
I looked up from the magic cross she’d drawn.
“Magic is a tad more complicated than your gods and demons would have you believe, angels,” she told us.
So they did know about the gods and demons here.
“Light and dark, active and passive. The cross of magic.” She tapped the diagram she’d drawn. “Some people call active magic ‘positive’ and passive magic ‘negative’, but I never liked how that sounded. Still, the terms positive and negative persist. Personally, I prefer the true terms ‘active magic’ and ‘passive magic’.”
Damiel’s eyes deconstructed her features. “You’re not just some simple schoolgirl, are you?”