I don’t know if I shouted mentally or aloud, but I stepped into time with Nathan and pushed against Az-Harad and her hoard of offspring as they pushed against the passage, resisting. The magic was there, I could feel it, but it was like pounding our heads against the ground and expecting to crack the earth. Not enough. Not nearly enough.
Take what I offer, Az-Harad whispered. There are no limits to your power, child. Take it, wield it. Defeat me. If you dare.
It threw me off. My throat went dry. Hunter and Isaac fell in behind us, working the same movements, trying to augment our spell, but it wasn’t the same. I was a summoner, and Nathan had practiced this. I could see thousands of jaws clacking and biting at the air.
I turned to see Lucas shouting as Aramus grabbed him by his jacket. Hayes was speeding away, leaving the light as she hurried up the steps.
“What have we done?” Nathan gasped as he finally tired, his arms falling to his sides. “You should have left me… you should have left me there, Amelia, I…”
Hunter grabbed Nathan by the shoulders and dragged him stumbling toward the stairs. “Isaac!”
Isaac’s hand closed around my wrist, and he pulled me in the same direction. They were abandoning ship. The portal would stay open, darkness would pour out. The Thousand Hungering Offspring—we couldn’t outrun them. It was hopeless.
Unless…
I pulled away from Isaac’s grip. He turned, startled, confused, and reached for me again. I shook my head as I stumbled back to the portal. “Go,” I told him. “Get somewhere safe, seal it off. Nathan knows the right spells, just—you have to go!”
He called for me to stop, and came after me, but I turned away from him to face the portal. Because Az-Harad was right. There was only one way. The way she offered. Limitless power. Which maybe meant power enough to fight back.
I thrust my hands out, and felt for the edges of the portal, and then what was beyond it. That blackness, that humming dark, even the voice of Az-Harad itself.
I reached in and pulled.
Amelia
The power that came from the Abyss was thick, like oil, oozing through my veins and nerves. Wherever it spread, sensation stopped. No pain, no pleasure, no hot or cold. There was no buzz to it like normal magic. Instead, it was simply an all-consuming presence.
There was no shape to give it. No need to weave it, to coordinate forces or focus it into words and gestures. There was just the power and my will. I turned both to the portal, into it, against the swarm of offspring clamoring to pour out of it. Just as I had simply taken Nathan while we were there, inside, all I had to do was reach out and push.
The swarm of red eyes and gnashing teeth burst, shrinking back into the distance of the void, away from this dimension and back where they belonged. The edges of the portal were tangible to me, as if I could peel the darkness off of the world and roll it up. Which I did. As easily as if it were made of silk, I scraped the edges off like a sticker and pressed down on them. The portal twisted, closing unevenly, as I twisted my hands around and closed them, crumbling the opening down until it was a spot of black hanging in the air, and then a speck, and then nothing.
Above us, magic thrummed. I could feel it in my skull like the buzzing of a gnat in my ear, irritating and wrong, an itch that I instinctively tried to scratch. I pressed my will against it and felt the shape of the spell as lines of magic arced down from the ceiling, flowing along the walls in a lattice that threaded through the stone.
“We have to go,” Nathan shouted, and I realized suddenly that they were still there, standing around me. Lucas and Isaac’s eyes were wide. Hunter was pale. Even Serena had a hand to her mouth. They were staring at me.
And they were terrified.
That should have hit me somewhere inside. Made a dent in my emotions. Instead, I looked up at the spell slowly sealing us in, reached out to it and tore the magic out of the walls.
There were flashes of light, arcs of errant energy seeking manifestation. Ozone turned the air acrid and burnt. Whatever magic was meant to seal the temple, it was simply gone. Dispersed.
I lowered my gaze back to them. “It’s okay. I stopped it. We’re okay now.”
That should have relieved me. I knew it, intellectually, but the feeling, the realization of it, was distant. It just was. I looked down at my hands. Why had I resisted to begin with? This kind of power—I could do anything. Fix anything. If I reached just so… I could even feel the border between life and death. A seething mass of power lay beyond it. Or, no—not power. Souls. Or maybe they were the same thing. I could bring Laura back.
I could even picture her face, her hair, the shape of her, and the power inside me urged me to bring her into the world. All I had to do was make a body, and then put her soul in it. It was the simplest thing in the world, and I raised a hand slowly thinking that if I did it just right, maybe she’d even have her memories. After all, all of them were out there in the psychic plane, waiting to be plucked like berries.
“Amelia,” Nathan said, softly, and I turned from my brief distraction to meet his eyes.
“Yes?” I wondered. He seemed concerned.
He licked his lips, and very carefully reached for my hands. I let him. “Amelia,” he repeated, slowly, “it’s done. The portal is closed. The failsafe is diffused. You can let it go, now.”
“Let go?” He wasn’t making sense.
Hunter crept forward, hesitant at first, but then with more purpose. He put his hand on my arm. “Amelia, please. Come back to us.”
I cocked my head at him. “What are you talking about, Hunter? I’m right here.”
Lucas joined them, and then Isaac.
Isaac put shaking fingers to my cheek. His eyes were wide, and wet. “You have to let it go. Give it up.”
“Please,” Lucas begged.
None of them made any sense. I stared around at them. Maybe they were confused. I could fix that, I realized. Then they’d see that there was nothing wrong. That I was me. Who else would I be? I smiled at them. “I can fix this.”
Nathan jerked suddenly to one side. I puzzled over that before I realized Serena had shoved him out of the way. She sucked in a breath and squeezed the words out. “Medusa’s tits, I hope you don’t kill me for this…”
“For wha—”
She slapped me. Hard. That, I felt.
“I told you,” she said, and drew a hand back, “that if you went dark…”
I barely had time to blink before she slapped me again. Both my cheeks stung. Tears stung at my eyes. I reached up to touch my face where it hurt, and for a moment… I saw their fear for what it was.
This time, as if it slipped in through the lingering sting of Serena’s abuse, I felt it. Deep. It stirred up revulsion in my gut, and suddenly the oily power of the Abyss felt like what it was—a sickness. It turned my stomach, and I pushed it away. It clung to my mind, to my will, tried to entice me again. I could bring back my parents. I could bring back Nathan’s parents, I could change everything that happened before, save all the lives of all the students and faculty lost. All I had to do was embrace and make the change.
I felt lips on mine. Hair scratched and tickled at my chin and cheeks. I tasted Hunter, smelled him, felt his lips desperate as they caught mine.
I didn’t push the darkness away. Not really. Instead, I invited something else in, something that swelled and pushed against it. Hunter. And Lucas, his arms around me. And Isaac, his hands tangled in my hair. And when I looked up—Nathan, his eyes intense as his lips moved. “Your fate. It’s your fate, Amelia.”
Sensation flooded me. Hot and cold, grief, joy, desire. Like I had never felt them before. My knees gave out, but my boys had me, held me and lowered me to the ground.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed, as they murmured to me.
“It’s all right,” Lucas said in my ear.
Isaac’s breath was warm on my hair. “You did it,” he said, “we’ve got you, Amelia. You’re okay.”
Hunter held m
y face in his hands, his forehead pressed to mine. “You came back, Amy. You came back to us.”
I swallowed hard and took time to let it out as they milled around me. Nathan stood to one side, brows pinched, frowning, his arms folded. Beside him, Serena had one hand on her hip, waiting impatiently until I finally urged the boys back and let them help me to my feet.
I broke away from them and strode toward Nathan.
“Well done,” he muttered.
I smiled at him, and a chuckle bubbled up from my chest. I shook my head as I turned to Serena. “You know I could have turned to dust, right?”
She looked me over and shrugged a shoulder. “I mean… heart of darkness really isn’t your color, honestly. I was doing you a favor.”
“Come here,” I laughed, and pulled her into a tight hug.
“Thank you,” I told her as she hugged me back. “Thank you.”
She extricated herself from me and held my hands. “Yeah, you’re welcome. Just, you know… don’t pull that shit again, kay?”
Nathan
I barely noticed writing the answers to Wardwell’s final exam on the paper or performing cantrips with fire for my elemental magic exam, and I barely remember what I wrote in the history paper about the relationship between magicians and djinn in ante-deluvian Persia. From the moment we emerged from the temple to a shocked Headmistress and a scowling Professor Klein, all I could think about was Amelia.
They way her eyes had turned to that bottomless black. The ease with which she wielded that power. The way that Hunter, Lucas, and Isaac clung to her afterward, and every day since. I understood it—understood what they felt, why they held so tightly to her, why they were with her every moment after that.
They were worried. And they needed to be.
I knocked on her door, on the last day of class, after exams were done. The post-year party was planned for that night, but I didn’t feel up to going. I suspected she didn’t either. It took a moment, but she answered.
“Nathan,” she said. “Uh… how did your exams go?”
“Well,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, of course they did. I think I passed mine, at least. So that’s something. Survived another year at Rosewilde. Yay.”
I rubbed my chin. “Yay, indeed. May I… come in?”
Amelia stepped back from the door and waved me in. “Pete and Serena already took off,” she said as I entered and looked around at the half-empty room. “I think they’re going to Brazil for the summer. God knows what they’re up to down there.”
“And you?” I asked. I thought I knew, though.
“Back to the house,” she said. “Um… and then from there… to Isaac’s family estate. For a little while, anyway. No one went home for Christmas, you know, so… I’m sure you’d be welcome. If you wanted. Not that it’s my place to invite you, I guess, but Isaac would. Invite you, I mean. Unless you’re going home to your family?”
Her cheeks had gone just a little red, along with her ears. It was hard not to smile at that.
“Maybe,” I said. “But I came to discuss something different.”
She deflated slightly, nodding. “Yeah, I figure you didn’t stop by after five weeks of radio silence to talk about exams and summer plans.”
I closed the door behind me. “What you did… in the temple. You’re aware what a danger that represents, I trust.”
Amelia shifted a little on her feet, then looked behind her and settled onto the edge of the bed biting her lip. “I haven’t had any more urges, or anything.”
“I suspect there’s a reason for that,” I said. I tried to keep my voice gentle. “Amelia, you embraced the Abyss. Az-Harad is going to push you again. Try to get you to take up that power. She doesn’t have short term goals—only a long game. I worry that everything that has happened—you bringing me back, my… infection, our plan to cure it… all of it may well have been her plan.”
“If you’re worried I’m going to go darkside, I—“
“I’m not worried you will go there willingly.” I sat on the bed across from her. “I’m worried that we’re playing a game of chess with a being who can see an infinite number of steps ahead of us, on a board with dimensions we can’t see, using pieces that are all the same color and don’t have any rules of movement.”
“At that point, is it really chess?” she asked.
I spread my hands. “That’s an excellent question and completes the analogy. We don’t know what game we’re playing.”
Amelia sighed, closing her eyes briefly as she rubbed the bridge of her nose. “If you think I haven’t thought about this, Nathan, then you don’t know me. I barely managed to pass my exams because I stayed up late thinking myself to death instead of studying. If I could have just dropped out and hidden away in Cambridge I would have. I’ve obsessed over it.”
“That’s good,” I said as I leaned forward. “Because we need to figure out what happens next, and how to avoid it.”
That should have alarmed her, I would have thought. Instead, she smiled a little. “So, we agree that we can avoid it, if we have the right information, and act smart?”
“I’d prefer if we actually were smart,” I mused. “But… I suppose you did put on quite a show. Not bad for…”
“A girl?” She asked, smirking.
I returned the expression with interest. “I was going to say for The Harbinger of Az-Harad, Dreadmother, She With The Thousand—“
She groaned and led her head fall forward. “I get it. Christ. Can we just call her ‘that bitch from the pit’ from now on? It’ll save us all a lot of time.”
“Agreed,” I chuckled. I looked around the room. She was mostly packed, it seemed. “Will you be… going to the party?”
Amelia pursed her lips and glanced at her suitcase. “Not this year. Just… it was a lot, you know? Sadie, and then the… haunting, if you want to call it that, and then everything… I could use a little quiet. And at the insistence of Serena and the boys, I actually have one last thing to do here.”
“Which is?”
“They convinced me to see Master Larson about my little night terror problem,” she muttered. “I honestly don’t think he can do anything but it’s worth a try. I hate to cut this short, but I’ve got a date with a sleeping enchantment and a bald psychic.”
I stood and held a hand out. “Come on, then. I’m due for a final check in anyway, and I had nothing to pack. I’ll walk you there.”
She eyed my hand like there was a possibility it might bite her, and then cautiously took it. I tried to decide if that was the first time I’d actually held her hand. Outside a moment of dire crisis, that is. Her fingers were strong, like a magician’s ought to be after a couple of years of training, but still soft. I let them go once she was up. A queer silence filled the space between us until she opened the door and led me out.
“So, your summer plans?” She asked. “Will you go home?”
“Perhaps for a few days,” I said. “My family isn’t especially fond of me. And after so long away… well, it’s not as though they came to visit last summer. I’m not even sure they know I’m back. Or, for that matter… if I was ever gone. The Crowleys aren’t that affectionate among themselves.”
“You really could come with us,” she said. “I mean, not if you’ve got something important to do, or anything. Or… I don’t know, what do your timelines say you should do?”
I got the impression she was joking with me and eyed her sideways. “There are still some valid timelines in operation. But if I—“
“Told me them they wouldn’t be valid anymore,” she breathed, and flashed me a half-smile. “Hunter told me all about it. That’s fine. You keep your secrets, Mister Crowley.”
“There… are significant gaps in them now,” I admitted. “Just flashes. I think that possibly the only reason I was able to retain was I did was because of the presence of a creature familiar with a non-spatial, non-temporal state of being. The human mind alone apparently
isn’t suited to navigating multiple timelines simultaneously. Well—you know. You were in the Abyss with me this time. What did you see?”
Amelia took a breath, as if she would answer, but only held it instead. After a few seconds she just shrugged. “I don’t really remember. A lot of bad shit, mostly.”
“I can certainly sympathize with that.” I quickened my step to reach the clinic door before her and held it open. “After you.”
She cut me a sly look as she went in ahead and glanced back at me when she passed. “Leaps and bounds, Mister Crowley. Leaps and bounds.”
We greeted Gina, who were assured that she had alerted Master Larson. “I could wait in the lobby,” I told her as we headed toward the door into the treatment area of the clinic. “Are the others meeting you here?”
“I’m meeting them after,” she said as she put a hand on the door handle. “Percy is going to set us up with a portal back to Cambridge, Lucas is supposed to meet him in the portal room. We’re going to take Laura’s car—er, I guess I mean my car. Two years, you’d think… anyway, we’re road tripping. The old-fashioned way. Roadside diners and stuff like that. I think Hunter and Isaac are planning some sort of surprise I’m not supposed to know about, so.” She chewed her lip a bit and glanced at the handle under her hand. “Uh… I mean, if you’re meeting Master Larson, too, you may as well come back with me. It would be good to have someone there.”
I nodded slowly. “Of course.”
She smiled and pulled the door open and held it. “After you, Mister Crowley.”
“Yes,” I murmured, “leaps and bounds indeed.”
We went down the hallways to where Master Larson waited along with a senior student, likely one of his apprentices. Thomas, I thought, or maybe just Tom. A ruddy faced young man with a topknot of ginger hair and a mala around his neck with much smaller beads than Master Larson’s. They were both, however, a study in orange linen.
“Amelia,” Master Larson said with a grin as we entered the room. “I’m glad you decided to come. I wondered if I would miss you.”
A Spell for Shadows: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts Page 29