The Last Magician

by Lisa Maxwell

“Hold her up, boys,” the leader of the three said. “I want to see the fear in her eyes—filthy maggot.”

  The two men pulled Leena upright and one gave her a sharp smack across the cheek.

  Dolph’s blood pulsed, his anger barely leashed. But he forced himself to stay still, to not rush in and ruin his one chance of freeing her.

  Still, seeing another man touch her, harm her . . . His knuckles ached from his grip on his cane. To hell with destroying the Brink. He would destroy them all.

  He crept through the shadows until he was almost directly above them.  Already he could feel the cold energy of the Brink. Unlike natural magic, which felt warm and alive, the Brink felt like ice. Like desolation and rot. It was perverse magic, power corrupted by ritual and amplified by the energy it drained. And like all unnatural magic, it came with a cost.

  This close, every ounce of his being wanted to turn and flee. This close, he could feel how easily everything he was could be taken from him. But he wouldn’t let anyone touch her like that again.

  The man who spoke lifted Leena’s head by her hair. “There you are,” he said with a laugh when she opened her left eye to look at him. Her right eye was swollen shut. “Do you know what’s about to happen to you, pigeon? I bet you do. I bet you can feel it, can’t you?” The man laughed. “It’s what maggots like you and your kind deserve.”

  Leena’s eye closed. Not a betrayal of weakness, Dolph knew, but to gather her strength.

  That’s my girl, Dolph thought as Leena muttered a foul curse. Then she opened her unbruised eye and spit in the man’s face.

  The man reacted instantly. His hand flew out, and Leena’s head snapped backward at the force of the blow.

  Dolph was already moving. He hoisted himself up onto the railing and busted the streetlamp with the end of his cane. Like prey that sensed a hunter nearby, the men below went still as the light went out, listening intently for the source of the disturbance.

  “What are you waiting for?” the leader shouted, breaking their wary silence, but his voice had an edge of nerves to it that wasn’t there before. “Drag her over.”

  The men didn’t immediately obey. As they hesitated, their eyes still adjusting, Dolph switched his patch, so he could see with the eye already accustomed to darkness. The bridge below now clear and visible to him, he dropped soundlessly from the walkway above. He ignored the sharp ache in his leg as he landed on the leader, knocking him to the ground and plunging the sharp blade concealed in the end of his cane into the man’s calf. The man let out a scream like he was being burned alive.

  That particular poison did have a tendency to sting.

  As the leader continued to scream, Dolph turned to the next man, but he was already struggling against some unseen assailant. With a sudden jerk, he went still, his eyes wide as he slumped to the ground. Jianyu appeared, seemingly materializing out of the night, and gave Dolph a nod of acknowledgment as they turned together to face the third man.

  The only one left seemed too paralyzed by fear to realize he’d be better off running. He was holding Leena in front of him like a shield.

  “Leave me be or I’ll kill her,” he said, his voice cracking as he blinked into the dark.

  Dolph stepped steadily toward them as Jianyu circled around the man’s other side.

  “You were already dead the moment you touched her,” Dolph murmured when he was barely an arm’s reach away.

  The man stumbled back, and Leena took the opportunity to struggle away from him. But he was too off-balance and his hold was too secure. Instead of letting her go, the man pulled her with him as he stumbled back, away from Dolph and toward the cold power of the Brink.

  Without thought for his own safety, Dolph reached for them, but his fingers barely grasped the sleeve of the man’s coat. The fabric ripped, and the man—and Leena—fell backward into the Brink.

  Dolph knew the moment she crossed it, because he felt her surprise and pain and desperation as keenly as if it were his own. The night around them lit from the magic coursing through her, draining from her. She screamed and writhed, her back arching at a painful-looking angle. Her arms and legs went stiff and shook with the terrible power that held her.

  The man holding her screamed as well, but not from the Brink. When she began convulsing, he dropped her and ran, disappearing into the night of that other shore, where Dolph couldn’t follow.

  But Dolph’s eyes were only for Leena. He watched in helpless horror as her body shook with the pain of her magic being ripped from her. He moved toward her, pushing past his own bone-deep fear of the Brink, but when his fingers brushed against the icy energy of it, he couldn’t make himself reach any farther.

  “Leena!” he shouted. “Look at me!”

  She slumped to the ground, drained but still moaning and twitching with pain. He could no longer feel her affinity.

  “Leena!” he screamed, fury and terror mingling in his voice.

  It was enough to distract her for a moment, and even as her face contorted, she tried to turn toward the sound of his voice.

  “That’s it,” he said when their eyes finally met.

  Her expression was wild with the pain and shock of the Brink’s devastating effect, but she wasn’t dead yet. As long as her heart beat, there was a chance, Dolph told himself, pushing away the truth.

  People didn’t come back from the Brink.

  Still, Leena was different, he told himself as she tried to focus on him. Dolph thought for a moment he saw her there, his own Leena, somewhere behind the agony twisting her features.

  “I need you to come to me, Streghina. I need you to try,” he pleaded.

  And because she was the strongest person he’d ever known, she did try. She forced herself to move, reaching for him, her limbs trembling with effort as she pulled herself back to safety.

  “That’s it, my love. Just a little more,” he told her, struggling to keep his voice from breaking into the animal-like wail he felt building within him.

  With the last of her strength, she inched along. Her face was drawn tight, but she kept going. His Leena. His own heart.

  “You can make it. Just a little farther.”

  But she looked up at him, her once-beautiful eyes now a lurid bloodred. Her expression was determined as she tried to whisper something, but before she could finish, she collapsed beyond his reach.

  “No!” he screamed. “You can’t leave us. You can’t give up now.” He knelt as close to the Brink as he dared get, willing her to keep moving.

  But Leena only blinked up at him, barely able to focus with her unbruised eye.

  No, he thought wildly. He wouldn’t accept her fate. Couldn’t accept it. Not his Leena, who had stood by his side since they were children. Not the woman who had been his partner in every way, despite all the mistakes he had made. He couldn’t leave her there. No matter what it meant for him.

  Dolph forced himself to reach out to Leena, to press through the searing cold bit by bit. To ignore the excruciating pain. Breaching the Brink was like putting your hand through glass and feeling the shards tear through skin and tendon. Or like dipping yourself in molten metal, if liquid steel could be colder than ice.

  But even that pain didn’t compare to the thought of losing her.

  Finally, he grabbed Leena’s hand. She blinked slowly, vacantly, at the pressure of his grasp, but with his fingers now wrapped securely around hers, he found that he didn’t have the strength to pull her back. The Brink was already wrapping its icy energy around his wrist, burrowing deep beneath his skin to seek out the heart of who and what he was.

  Then, suddenly, he was moving. Jianyu had taken him by the legs and was pulling him and Leena both back, away from the invisible boundary. With the strength he had left, Dolph took Leena into his arms and settled her across his lap, barely aware of the numbness inside his own chest.

  “I wasn’t fast enough,” Jianyu said. “I tried to get her before they took her, but . . .”

  Dolph wasn’t eve
n hearing him.

  “No,” Dolph whispered, tracing the lines of her face. Her breath rattled weakly from her lungs as he clutched her to him, rocking and pleading for her to stay with him. “I can’t do this without you.”

  But she didn’t respond.

  “No!” he screamed when he realized her body had gone limp in his arms. “No!” Again and again, he wailed into the night, hatred and anguish hardening him, sealing him over, like a fossil of the man he’d once been.

  A SLIP THROUGH TIME

  December 1926—The Upper West Side

  Esta froze as the blond trained the gun on her. His expression was a mixture of disgust and anticipation as he shifted his aim between her and Logan.

  “I told you,” he growled at Schwab. “I warned you something like this would happen.”

  “Jack!” Schwab yelled, grabbing for the man’s arm again. “Put that gun down!”

  Jack shook him off. “You have no idea what they are, what they’re capable of.” He turned to Esta and Logan. “Who sent you? Tell me!” he screamed, his face red with fury as he continued to swing the gun back and forth, alternating between the two of them.

  Esta glanced at Logan and noticed the dark stain creeping across the white shirt beneath his tuxedo jacket. His eyes flickered open and met hers. He didn’t look so cocky anymore.

  “I won’t be ruined again,” the blond said as he cocked the hammer back again and steadied his aim at Logan. “Not this time.”

  Never reveal what you can do. It was one of their most important rules. Because if the Order knew what she was capable of, they would never stop hunting her. But they’d already seen her.  And the stain creeping across Logan’s shirt was growing at an alarming rate. She had to get him out, to get him back.

  It seemed to happen all at once—

  She heard the click of the gun being cocked, but she was already pulling time around her.

  “Noooooo!” Logan shouted, his voice as thick and slow as the moment itself had become.

  The echoing boom of the pistol.

  Esta rushing across the remaining length of the hallway, putting herself between Logan and the gun.

  Grabbing Logan tightly around the torso, she reached for safety . . . focusing all of her strength and power to reach further . . . and pulled them both into an empty version of the same hallway.

  Daylight now filtered in through an unwashed window at the far end of the hall, lighting the dust motes they’d disturbed in the stale air of the completely silent house.

  Logan moaned and shifted himself off her. “What the hell did you do?”

  She ignored her own unease and took in the changed hallway, the silent, unoccupied house. “I got us out of there.”

  “In front of them?” His skin was pale, and he was shaking.

  “They’d already seen me.”

  “You didn’t have to come barging in like that,” he rasped, grimacing as he shifted his weight. “I had it under control.”

  She should have been irritated that he’d reverted to his usual pain-in-the-ass demeanor so quickly, but Esta was almost too relieved to care. It meant his injury probably wasn’t killing him. Yet.

  Esta nodded toward his bloody shirt. “Yeah. You were doing great.”

  “Don’t put this on me. If you hadn’t gone after a diamond, you wouldn’t have been late meeting me. We could have already been gone before Schwab showed up,” he argued. “None of this would have happened.”

  She glared back at him, not giving an inch. But she knew—and hated—that he was right. “I got you out, didn’t I? Or maybe you’d prefer being dead?”

  “They’re going to know.”

  “I know,” she said through gritted teeth.

  To Schwab and the other man, Esta and Logan would have seemed to disappear, and people didn’t just disappear. Not without magic—natural magic. Old magic. Even Schwab would have understood that much.

  “The Order will have heard about it,” Logan said, belaboring his point. “Who knows what that will do. . . .”

  “Maybe it won’t matter,” she said, trying to will away her uncertainty. “We’ve never changed anything before.”

  “No one has ever seen us before,” he pressed.

  “Well, we don’t live in the 1920s. It’s not like they’re going to keep looking for a couple of teenagers for the next hundred years.”

  “The Order has a long memory.” Logan glared at her, or he tried to, but his eyes still weren’t quite focusing, and the dizziness that usually hit him after slipping through time was having a clear effect. He fell back on his elbows. “When are we, anyway?”

  Esta looked around the musty stillness of the hallway. All at once she felt less confident about her choices. “I’m not sure,” she admitted.

  “How can you not be sure?” He sounded too arrogant for someone who was probably bleeding to death. “Weren’t you the one who brought us here?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure exactly what year it is. I was just trying to get us out of there, and then the gun went off and . . .” She trailed off as she felt a sharp pain in her shoulder, reminding her of what had happened. She touched the damp, torn fabric gingerly.

  Logan’s unfocused gaze raked over her. “You’re hit?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, frustrated that she’d hesitated and ended up in the bullet’s path. “It’s barely a scratch, which is more than I can say for you.” She pulled herself off the floor and offered Logan her hand.

  He allowed her to help him up, but he swayed, unsteady on his feet, and put all his weight on her to stay upright.

  “We’re not any later than forty-eight. Probably sometime in the thirties, by the look of the house. Can you walk at all?” she asked before he could complain any more.

  “I think so,” he said, grimacing as he clutched his side. The effort it had taken to stand had drained him of almost all color.

  “Good. Whenever this is, I can’t get us back from in here.” Pain throbbed in her shoulder, but the bullet really had only grazed her. She’d heal, but if she didn’t get Logan back to Professor Lachlan’s soon, she wasn’t sure if he would. “We need to get outside.”

  The fact was, Esta’s ability to manipulate time had certain limitations, mainly that time was attached to place. Sites bore the imprint of their whole history, all layered one moment on top of the other—past, present, and future. She could move vertically between those layers, but the location had to exist during the moment she wanted to reach. Schwab’s mansion had been torn down in 1948. It didn’t exist during her own time, so she couldn’t get them back from inside the house. But the streets of the Upper West Side were still basically the same.

  Logan stumbled a little, but for the most part, they made it through the empty house without much problem. As they reached the front door, though, Esta heard sounds from deep within the house.

  “What’s that?” Logan lifted his head to listen.

  “I don’t know,” she said, pulling him along.

  “If it’s the Order—”

  “We have to get out of here. Now,” she said, cutting him off.

  Esta opened the front door as a pair of deep voices carried to her through the empty halls. She tugged Logan out into the icy chill of the day, and they stumbled toward the front gates of the mansion.

  Traveling through the layers of time wasn’t as easy as pulling on the gaps between moments to slow the seconds. It took a lot more energy, and it also took something to focus that energy and augment her own affinity—a stone not unlike the Pharaoh’s Heart that she wore in a silver cuff hidden beneath the sleeve of her maid’s uniform.

  Against her arm, her own stone still felt warm from slipping through time a few minutes before. The pain of her injury and everything else that had happened had left her drained, so trying to find the right layer of time was more of a struggle than usual. The harder she tried, the warmer the stone became, until it was almost uncomfortably hot against her skin.

  Esta had never
made two trips so close together before. She and the stone both probably needed more time to recover, but time, ironically enough, was the one thing that neither of them had if she wanted to avoid being seen again.

  The voices were closer now.

  She forced herself to ignore the searing bite of the stone’s heat against her arm, and with every last ounce of determination she had left, she finally found the layer of time she needed and dragged them both through.

  The snow around them disappeared as Esta felt the familiar push-pull sensation of being outside the normal rules of time. Schwab’s castlelike mansion faded into the brownish-red brick of a flat-faced apartment building, and the city—her city—appeared. The sleek, modern cars and the trees full with summer leaves and other structures on the streets around them materialized out of nothing. It was early in the morning, only moments after they’d originally departed, and the streets were empty and quiet.

  She let out a relieved laugh as she collapsed under Logan’s weight onto the warm sidewalk. “We made it,” she told him, looking around for some sign of Dakari, Professor Lachlan’s bodyguard and their ride.

  But Logan didn’t reply. His skin was ashen, and his eyes stared blankly through half-closed lids as the modern city buzzed with life around them.

  LIBERO LIBRO

  November 1900—The Bowery

  Dolph Saunders sat in his darkened office and ran his finger across the fragile scrap of material he was holding. He didn’t need light to see what was written on it. He’d memorized the single line months ago: libero Libro.

  Freedom from the Book.

  At least, that’s what he thought it said—the e was smudged. Perhaps it was better translated, from the Book, freedom?

  “Dolph?” A sliver of light cracked open the gloom of his self-imposed cell.

  “Leave me be, Nibs,” Dolph growled. He set the scrap on the desktop in front of him and drained the last of the whiskey in the bottle he’d been nursing all morning.

  The door opened farther, spilling light into the room, and Dolph raised his hand to ward off the brightness.