“Mister Crowley does make a pertinent point,” she admitted as she went to the wall in her office where the passage was, though it was now hidden behind the façade of the new wall. “Though I hate to go anywhere near Sinclaire’s Abyssal sanctum… he is correct. There are a number of safeguards intended to seal it off. Permanently.”
“So what,” I asked as she traced her fingers in a complex pattern over the wallpaper, “if it looks like things are going south, we just pull the ripcord?”
“Not you,” she muttered as he finished the key sigil. It flashed purple, and the wall rolled back like paper. I realized then that it actually was just paper—the reverse side was covered in script and sigils. Hayes turned to us. “I know the procedures. I’ll be accompanying you down, naturally. I can hardly ask students to do what I’m not myself willing to attempt. I’ve reviewed Mister Crowley’s work—his and yours, that is, Miss Cresswin—and I can assist.”
“And with Nathan in the center,” Isaac said, “that makes five around the circumference.”
“Six would be better,” I muttered as I peered into the endless black of that horrible stairway down into what looked like the heart of the Abyss itself. It may as well have been. “But I can’t ask anyone else to risk it.”
“Miss Athenbow will assist—”
“No,” Hunter said. “They’ll need two security officers up here, just in case. It should be someone else.”
“Serena would help,” Lucas said. “Assuming, you know… we can pry her off of Pete.”
I snorted. “That’s a big assumption. But… she was there last time, and she didn’t lose her nerve. No more than any of us did. I’ll ask her. But if she says no, we can do it on our own. The last thing we need is someone who hasn’t seen what we have freaking out if something tries to come through the portal.”
“If that’s settled, then,” Hayes said slowly, staring down in the darkness just as I had and looking almost as nervous about it, “we’ll start in two hours. Time enough to make the preparations outlined in your extraordinary work. Dismissed, for the most part—Miss Cresswin, if you’d stay behind?”
Even if she didn’t use the tone, I still somehow felt like I was in trouble. I gave the boys a nod as they left and waited for the door to close and Hayes to speak. When we were alone, she paced to the desk and picked up one of the paperweights. Nothing special, just a smooth cube of stone that she turned over in her hands.
“The work you’ve done with Mister Crowley,” she said finally, “how much of it is his? How much yours?”
The question caught me a little off guard. “Uh… I don’t know? Maybe… half and half. Why?”
“And which parts were he responsible for?” she asked.
“Oh, it wasn’t really like that,” I said, and went to the notebook on the desk to flip it open and page through. “Pretty much every part of the ritual is something we both collaborated on. I designed most of the opening, based on Sinclaire’s lessons. To try and make it safer. The tether was largely Nathan’s work, but it was my idea to incorporate the ‘battery’, and he was the one that worked out the containment that will keep it working—”
“So, what you’re saying is that you can no longer separate the two,” Hayes said gently before I rambled on too long.
I shrugged. “Basically. Why?”
She put the cube down and kept her hand on it as she seemed to turn pensive thoughts into words. Finally, she turned to me, clasping her hands. “I have a concern about Mister Crowley’s… fitness. His state of mind.”
I looked back down at the notebook, frowning. “Well, the math all checks out. He’s still got his wits, and we ran every equation… wait, what do you mean ‘concern’?”
“I’ll be frank,” she said. “I’m not certain we can entirely trust his intentions. They may not be his own.”
“Okay,” I said, still a little confused, “but the shadow is infecting his astral body, not his brain, it doesn’t have access or control of his conscious or unconscious thought processes, just his—”
“He spent one year in the Abyss,” Hayes said. “I realize that this may be difficult to countenance, but I have read Mister Crowley’s file, and the reports of his previous excursion into Abyssal magic. I’m also well aware who his parents were… and the role they played in the doomed class of 1999. Can you be absolutely certain that all of this we’re about to attempt is, in fact, expressly for the purpose stated? That there are no ulterior motives? There are unsolved variables in your equations. Chaotic elements that appear to be difficult to predict. I’d like you to consider whether Mister Crowley isn’t himself one of those variables.”
I hadn’t considered it. Not at all. But I understood why she might worry. “No offense, Headmistress Hayes but… this is the only way we have available to us. We’ll just have to roll with the mystical punches. But I am very confident that this will work.”
“It isn’t the only way.” She squared her shoulders a little. “Professor Klein has apprised me of another, possibly safer, approach. When he arrived, I briefed him, and he explained the alternative. I wanted to wait until I could see your work before I made the decision, and I still haven’t.”
I stared at her, not sure whether to be furious or to fall over laughing. All this time? “I… we just spent three months of hardly sleeping, working ourselves to death… what do you mean there’s another way? What is it?”
Hayes spread her hands. “As I said, I wanted to see the alternative. According the Professor Klein… it is possible to eliminate the entity. Isolate it, seal it. It’s been done before, a number of times.”
“Okay,” I said, “sure, we know about that, but we couldn’t do it without shredding Nathan’s energy bodies apart, he’d never be a magician and it could have any number on his body including potentially… uh, potentially… killing him. But you know that.”
To her credit—what little there was—she seemed uncomfortable confronting that possibility, fidgeting with the corner of the desk briefly before she nodded. “It would be a great loss, and one that I would regret for the rest of my days,” she said quietly. “But weighing that against the alternative? How can we not consider it?”
“Uh, how about because we don’t kill people?” I offered. “Or because we’re magicians, and we do impossible things like this. Headmistress… Pepper—magician to magician? This work is a breakthrough. Nothing like this has ever been done, and if we can do it safely the implications… we could have a safe way to protect ourselves from further incursions. There are long term benefits to this work, and Nathan deserves the chance to survive.”
She’d raised an eyebrow at my use of her first name, but this wasn’t about students and faculty. This was about humanity, about whether or not we sacrificed one person’s life just to solve a problem. And if me and the boys had to fend off her, and Klein, and the rest of the faculty to do what we thought was right—I didn’t have a doubt in my mind that they’d do it. And I’d perform the ritual myself and somehow make it work. I stood just slightly straighter, raising my chin as Hayes appraised me.
The headmistress picked up the notebook from the desk and stared down at a page. “Be honest with me,” she said, “what is your confidence that you can accomplish this? If there’s a doubt, I need to know.”
I took the notebook from her hands and closed it and ran my hands over the plain front of it for a moment, deciding how to answer. But there was only one answer I could possibly give, and I knew it.
I looked up from the cover. “I can do this, Headmistress. I’m absolutely certain.”
For several moments she regarded me, eyes slightly narrowed, the barest hint of a wrinkle between her brows, like maybe she could pierce some mask I was putting on for her. It wasn’t until then that I realized… it wasn’t a mask.
I could do this. I knew the spells, the order, the entire ritual. Already, I could practically feel the shape of the magic. “I’m a summoner,” I told her. “This is what I do.”
&n
bsp; The corner of mouth twitched up. “Perhaps it is. Gather whoever you believe will be useful. We’ll start very soon.”
“Thank you,” I said as I took a step back and turned to the door.
“Oh, and Miss Cresswin?” Hayes asked as I reached it and began to turn the handle. I looked back at her. “No pressure—but it would be ideal if this experimental magic didn’t destroy the world.”
Yeah, I thought as I gave her a final nod and left to find Serena. Yeah, that would be really good.
Amelia
Serena gave me a blank, distant look. “You wanna what now?”
“I know it sounds crazy,” I said, pacing back and forth in her dorm.
Pete sat on her bed, working on her skirt with a needle and thread. Why, exactly, I couldn’t fathom. “It doesn’t sound crazy,” he said, expressionless. “Just opening up the Abyss is crazy. Taking a vacation there sounds apocalyptically dumb.”
I tried to remember—was that the longest series of words I’d heard from him? Was that an attempt at a joke? I shook my head in amazement and to shake his assessment off, then gave Serena a pleading look. “I need someone there who I can trust,” I said. “Not just to do the right thing, but to face this with me without flinching. You’re the baddest, most hard-core magician I know. I’d trust you not to piss yourself before I trusted the boys.”
Serena took a long breath, considering. Her arms were folded and had been since I pitched the idea. She looked away now, a hint of a smile on her lips. “Well… that’s definitely true, and everything,” she murmured, “but it’s not exactly a stellar sales pitch.”
I waved at the open notebook on her desk. “Check it over yourself.”
She glanced at it, but shook her head. “It’s not that I don’t trust you work, girl, it’s the part where we throw someone into the abyss and then pull them out again like they’re getting a shampoo or a… flea bath. And last I checked, weren’t you and Nathan about to kill each other or… rage fuck or something? This is a lot to do for him.”
“We were not going to rage fuck,” I grumbled. “And… yeah, you kind of missed a little bit.”
I couldn’t really help that my eyes when to Pete on the bed. It was automatic, a reflex. Serena didn’t miss it.
Her arms dropped, and she looked at Pete for a long moment. “All right,” she breathed. “Sure. Guilty as charged. But look how adorable he is there taking up the hem of my skirt? He’s so sweet.”
“And I’m very happy for you,” I assured her. “Really. I’m not—I didn’t mean to say—”
She snorted and rolled her eyes. “You didn’t have to. I know what I’m like… I just can’t resist a giant—”
“It’s fine,” I said quickly, not needing to hear the end of that sentence. “Really, Serena, I’m happy for you. And for Pete.”
Peter flashed me the closest thing to a smile he was probably capable of.
“I’m not going to browbeat you,” I said as I picked up the notebook. “I get it, you’ve got a lot to lose. I can’t ask you to risk that.”
She sighed as she put a hand on my arm. “No… stop. I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it. I just said it was dumb, and dangerous. But it’s not like that doesn’t describe four fifths of my entire life. I’m dating an incubus, for fuck’s sake.”
“Only one sixteenth,” Pete pointed out helpfully.
“Yes, baby,” Serena said, “and it is plenty for Mama.”
I waited as they ogled one another, until Serena seemed to get a hold of herself. She shrugged and took the notebook from me to page through it. “I have some making up to do,” she said. “I figure something like this’ll get me slack for like… I don’t know, a hundred years?”
Smiling, I took the notebook from her. “Two hundred. Promise.”
Serena nodded, then turned and crawled onto the bed. Pete set aside her skirt as she crawled on top of him, and possibly tried to scoop his uvula out with her tongue. They grunted as she rocked her hips against his and I finally turned away as my sense of decency caught up with my shock.
It went on for… some time.
When it finally did stop, the bed creaked a bit and I looked back carefully to see Serena adjusting her skirt. “Kay,” she chirped. “All done. Let’s go give your friend his transdimensional flea bath.”
An hour later, we stood at the top of those steps again.
“You okay?” Isaac asked.
I realized I had been standing there a long time, staring down the steps. I took a breath. “I’m okay,” I said. I repeated it to myself a few times, before I turned to face him and the others.
Lucas, Isaac, Hunter, Nathan, Serena, and Headmistress Hayes were arrayed behind me. “Last time, I was under duress. Sinclaire forced me down there. This time… I’m going on my own. To fix something. It’s different.”
Nathan came forward, rested a hand on my shoulder, and gave a slight nod before he headed down the stairs.
Maybe that was what I needed. For someone else to go first. It made me feel like a coward, but… less so when I turned and followed him down. We filed down the passage. Before, the lights had flickered to life and led the way. Maybe whatever magic gave them life had been cut off when Hayes sealed the place up. This time, Nathan and Hunter called up flickering lights that seemed to struggle against the darkness.
There was still power in that place. The same power that had been there before. I could feel it as naturally as I felt my own heartbeat. It lingered, clinging to the cool walls, lurking under the stairs, and nestled in the cavern below us like a predator waiting for us to get close enough to pounce on.
The lights didn’t reach to the edge of the walls when we finally reached the temple. The only way to know how large the cavern was, was from the sound—even out breaths echoed in the great space.
“We need more light around the center,” Nathan said. “Bring the box.”
Lucas, Isaac, and Serena all added lights to Hunter and Nathan’s. They had to bring them close to the ground in order to give off enough that Nathan and I could see the floor. And the box.
Hayes collected it from where it sat on one side of the stairs. It was a crate, really, sealed up just after the rest of Sinclaire’s office was dismantled and this place closed up. She set it down, and with Nathan’s help pried the top off. Inside were all that remained of the materials left from Sinclaire’s ritual.
“There’s got to be some other way,” I murmured as Nathan snapped a chunk of the greasy chalk in half and handed me half. I shuddered as I recalled what it was made out of.
“Not for the first part,” he said softly. “Don’t worry. After this, we’ll destroy all of it.”
I nodded and looked around at the open floor. A fresh canvas. At least this time I wasn’t decorating it on my own. “I’ll take west,” I said. “Meet you in the middle.”
Nathan took his chalk to the opposite side of the space, and we both knelt to the work.
It took a couple of hours. At least the dank temple was nice and cool, in a supernaturally chilled, there-is-no-light-or-life-here-this-is-a-horrible-mistake kind of way. My back cracked when I finally stood from the awful lines with a chunk of chalk about the size of a quarter. I looked down at it. Hopefully, we’d done it right. If not… well, there wasn’t enough left to try again, and I suspected that none of us wanted to find out how the stuff was actually made.
“We’re done,” Nathan announced. “We should start.”
I met Nathan’s eyes, and silently pleaded for him to say something to the boys. Anything that could help them in case he didn’t make it. And it looked, for a moment, like he was considering it. He looked from me to them, hesitating.
But instead of saying anything that would offer closure, he went to the center of the circle and clasped his hands behind his back. “Whatever happens,” he told me, “keep going.”
I bit back a sigh. I gave him a nod and gestured around at the focal points of the circle. “Like we talked about,” I told the others. “Ju
st keep the circle sealed.”
They positioned themselves around the circumference, right where they were supposed to be. Hunter started the spell, muttering the words quietly, as if to himself, as he watched Nathan and began the movements to seal the circle tight. One at a time, the others joined him.
I swallowed around a lump in my throat and raised my hands, but my lips wouldn’t move. Nathan watched me, brows furrowed. “You can do this,” he said. His words were muffled behind the thickening barrier that would trap him in there with both the shadow, and a hole in creation that led to the worst possible place.
It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could. It was that I didn’t know, in that moment, if I should.
I wish I had taken the time to hug him, or… something that showed him I would care if this went wrong. Nathan started to say something else, but his knees almost buckled. He swayed and got slowly down on all fours. Eyes closed tight. He muttered something, but I couldn’t hear him anymore. I recognized the way his eyes rolled, though, and a moment later, above him in the circle, a speck of darkness swelled, and stretched and began to spread.
There was no more time to hesitate, or second guess. “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Just… hang on.”
I doubted Nathan could hear me as he pressed a hand to the side of his head. The circle wasn’t going to get more sealed than it was.
My hands came up as I closed my eyes, and let the movements take over my hands and arms. The sound of the words to the first spell buzzed in my constricted throat. For a moment I was back in time, performing for Sinclaire, my guts twisting and cold as I worked the magic meant to bring something terrible into the world. I stumbled and had to start over.
This wasn’t for Sinclaire. It was for Nathan, and for Hunter, Lucas, and Isaac. So that everything we’d gone through wasn’t for nothing. I opened my eyes and saw the shadow hunting along the edge of the barrier, testing for weaknesses as Nathan languished at the center, his mouth open in a scream none of us could hear.
A Spell for Shadows: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts Page 27