Broken by Magic

by Rebecca Danese

  “Jesus, Agnes. What was I supposed to do? I was under Cassie’s magic influence, and I thought that seven Augurs against three would be better than one Normal.”

  “Your problem, Curtis, is that you can’t seem to leave things alone. You’re constantly trying to be the big man, and you know that Ella is important. You’re aware that she is capable of changing the way people view Augurs once and for all, and yet you insist on getting involved. You, Normal, seem to tangle yourself up in our affairs, and it’s only because of my sister that you’ve managed to get this far. If you aren’t careful, you will both end up dead because of it.”

  She had once told me, before Munday went psycho and we left London, that almost every scenario she had seen in her visions ended up with me dead. In all but one of Agnes’s premonitions, we ended up losing horribly to The Magic Circle and, ultimately, Munday.

  Is that what’s happening now, I wonder? Is this how we lose to them? I quickly try to think of something else. I look at the peculiar woman next to me, the one that helped to raise the girl I love after their parents died, and wonder more than ever what her deal is.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” I blurt out as she takes a sharp turn onto a busier road, blending into the rest of the traffic with a casual speed.

  “About what?”

  “Munday, of course. You knew that something was going to happen. You told me that Ella had a purpose and that I needed to help you encourage her to use her powers,” I say exasperatedly.

  “I knew that something was going to happen, yes. I knew that Ella was needed by the Duke to use her powers, and thanks to your little disappearance at the hands of the ATU, she did exactly what we needed. Nice touch, by the way, helping to defeat Munday like that.”

  The anger flares up inside me at her irreverence towards everything that Ella and I went through.

  “And the Duke?” I ask through clenched teeth.

  “What about him?” she replies so casually I’m in awe at her ability to lie.

  “You’re joking, right? Or are you in his back pocket too?” Either I’m going mad, or Agnes has been lying to us the entire time, and she’s working for the Duke even now. My chest tightens, and scenarios of leaping out of the moving car run through my mind. Where could I go that I could actually trust someone? I need Ella back, fast.

  “Curtis, what are you talking about?” she asks as we finally reach the motorway heading back to London. But before I can accuse her of all the things I think she’s up to, I see her eyes roll, and a strange sound escapes from her lips. Her hands relax on the wheel, and I react just quick enough to stop us from veering off the road or into another car. Crap.

  I’ve never seen her have one of her visions first hand, but I’m beginning to understand why she spends so much time cooped up. Her foot relaxes off the accelerator, and the car begins to slow, drivers honking us as they pass by. I pull on the steering wheel as her arms drop to her sides and press various buttons and switches until I find the hazard lights, which I find on my fourth try.

  “Agnes! Agnes, please wake up! I don’t want to be flattened by a lorry on this motorway. This isn’t the way we die, you said so yourself.” I give her a shake while keeping one hand on the wheel and try to manoeuvre us over to the hard shoulder. Her foot is still pressed down on the accelerator slightly, and the car is making an unhappy sound from being in the wrong gear, but to top it off, I can see a breakdown in front of us, and within a minute or two we’ll be turning Beryl’s Aston Martin into a pile of scrap metal if she doesn’t wake up.

  As if that wasn’t enough, I’m sure Edward and his team are just minutes behind us, and we’re running out of time. I undo my seatbelt and try to work out how to shove her over to the passenger side, but practicing my terrible driving in a £300,000 car is probably not the best idea.

  “Oh, thank God,” I say when Agnes suddenly gasps back to life. She shakes her head as if to remove the pictures from in front of her eyes.

  “We have to go,” she says, putting the car back on the road within seconds of regaining consciousness as I clip my seatbelt back on. We sit in silence for the first mile or so, the car purring down the road being the only noise.

  “Are you going to tell me what that was all about?” I say as soon as I think she’ll be able to handle a conversation.

  “Edward is about to call his cavalry. I was planning to take us back to the others, but now that isn’t an option.”

  “We’re not going back to Ella?”

  “Not yet. I have to do something first,” she says cryptically. I can see I’m not going to get any more information out of her just now, so I keep my mouth shut and let her drive.

  The drive from Hertfordshire to North London is about an hour and a half on a good day, and we’ve missed rush hour, so we make it without having to stop more than once for a bathroom break and for Agnes to have a coffee. The most disconcerting thing about it is she manages not to speak to me for the entire first hour, and the silence is starting to do my head in.

  “How does it work then, when you have your visions? I mean, are they always as severe as that?” I say when I can take it no longer.

  She seems to consider whether or not I’m worth speaking to, but eventually she gives in. “I don’t always black out. Usually I get snippets of the future, like a daydream. Occasionally I’ll just get the end of something that’s happening, like knowing how this conversation is going to end.”

  “Creepy,” I say before realising I muttered it aloud.

  “Sometimes,” she continues, ignoring me, “I see several outcomes in one go. That’s when they get violent.”

  “So, you saw multiple outcomes to what’s happening now?”

  She only gives me a grim nod in response. I wriggle down in my seat and stare out of the window while I think this through. There’s probably not much point in me speculating about Agnes’s visions, but I do anyway.

  Hopefully she’ll tell Ella exactly what she’s seen when we eventually get to her, and maybe Ella will then fill me in. If she’ll speak to me, that is.

  It’s only when I start to see London buses on the roads that I realise we’re back in town. I catch the name of a tube station and realise that we’ve gone far East rather than Northwest where we’re originally from.

  Agnes drives competently along the busy roads, and I have to admire her handling of the car. She’s probably being all the more careful considering the car is Beryl’s pride and joy.

  It’s early afternoon, and there are plenty of people about, but the daylight also highlights the quantity of anti-Augur graffiti on the streets and the number of burned-out cars parked in the side roads.

  “What the hell has been going on here?” I ask as I notice a couple of guys scuffling on the pavement outside a pub.

  “Things have gotten out of hand here since Munday’s outburst,” Agnes says.

  “But this isn’t what we see on the news,” I say, aghast.

  “No, but there’s a heavy concentration of Augurs in this area, so the press usually keep clear,” she explains.

  I stare out of the window at the disaster around us. This isn’t the London I remember, and I feel like we stick out like a sore thumb in the car we’re driving.

  “I’ll park somewhere out of sight, and we’ll take it on foot the rest of the way,” Agnes says, practically reading my mind. She does that a lot, and I wonder if seeing the future also means she can predict what I’m going to say before I say it.

  “Something like that,” she says, smirking.

  “Get out of my head, will you?” I say, trying not to shudder at the thought.

  “I’m not in your head. I just know what you’re going to say before you say it. It saves having to hear you get to the point.”

  “Oh, funny,” I say sarcastically.

  Agnes takes a side road and eventually pulls up outside the only house in the neighbourhood that has a garage. She reaches inside the glove compartment of the Aston Martin and pulls out a
key fob, which makes the door open.

  “This your place?” I ask as she parks the car inside and we step out.

  “No, it’s one of Beryl’s, but I had a vision of coming here about a week ago and made sure that the right key would be in the car. At the time I didn’t know why.”

  “Wow. How much money does this lady have?”

  “A lot. She used to be in the exporting business before she and her husband divorced,” Agnes says.

  “Well, she did alright, didn’t she?”

  Agnes merely nods and leads the way, closing the garage behind her and pocketing the key. We walk for about twenty minutes, take a bus another fifteen and get off in an area that looks worse than the one we just drove through. I’m surprised that all the decay and ruin is so contained in this one small area of the city and hope that it doesn’t spread to where mum and dad are.

  “Why would Augurs let it get like this, if there’s so many of them here?” I ask.

  “This wasn’t done by Augurs, Curtis,” Agnes says with a hint of disgust in her voice.

  “Normals did all this?” I say incredulously as we walk past a shop front with the windows smashed in. She doesn’t say anything, but I see the hint of a nod.

  Normals ruined an area that they knew had Augurs living there, out of hate. There’s an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach as we walk down a street littered with rubbish and walls strewn with graffiti bearing messages of hatred.

  I’m surprised when Agnes stops by an alleyway and turns to face me.

  “I don’t want you to come in with me, but I know that if I leave you out here by yourself, you’ll end up in a fight with someone, so I have to take you inside,” she says blandly. I look around to see who my potential nemesis might be. If Agnes says I’m going to get into a fight, I know that it’s pretty certain I will, so I’m not arguing.

  “This is really an Augurs-only club, so our best option is to pretend you are one for now.”

  “What? Me, an Augur?” I say with surprise.

  “Yes, yes. Just say your power isn’t demonstrable. Your Augur power is something that you can’t openly prove, a bit like Jer’s.”

  I wrack my brains for some kind of ability that I could lie about. Making good cups of tea? But what if they want me to prove it? I’m not actually that good at making tea.

  I don’t get much of a chance to think about it as Agnes steps into the alleyway, and I’m forced to follow her. A set of narrow steps leads down to a filthy door that I think was once painted green, before the layers of grime and filth covered it over. There’s no door number or doorbell, but there is a metal door knocker in the shape of a cat. Agnes lifts it and allows it to drop once with a thud, and we wait.

  A minute passes, then two, and I’m just about to say that whoever lives here must not be in when the door opens, an eye just visible through the crack.

  “Miss Cooper. Nice to see you again,” the gravelly voice of an older man says. “You’ve brought company,” he says, looking me up and down with one eye.

  “A friend of mine. His name is James,” she lies. I hope that my surprise of her using an alias doesn’t show.

  “Augur?” the man asks.

  “Of course,” she smiles.

  “You’ll vouch for his entry?”

  “One hundred percent.” Her pretended confidence is unnerving, but he doesn’t seem to sense that she’s not telling the truth. I wonder why they don’t put a lie-detecting Augur on the door, but they would probably want high pay, the sort a small club couldn’t afford.

  The door closes in our faces, and then we hear the sound of a chain being removed before it reopens all the way.

  We step into a dingy hallway, one bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling revealing a second door. This one is red and peeling, but there’s no handle on the outside.

  “A quick pat down, sir, if you would,” he says to me. I look between him and Agnes, perplexed, but he goes ahead and searches me anyway. I don’t protest, too worried to speak, but he doesn’t even look at the knife which he feels in my pocket. “All clear, I see. Miss Cooper, I am going to assume you have no drugs on your person,” he smiles at her. A drug search. That explains why he didn’t care about the knife.

  “Absolutely not, George, thank you.”

  “Very good. One moment please,” he says, stepping in front of us and placing his hand on the door. The light flickers for a moment, and the door seems to crumble at his touch, disintegrating into nothing. The doorman smiles and gestures for us to step through, although I can’t see what we’re stepping into until we’ve both passed through, and the door has reformed itself behind us.

  Loud music and the sound of voices hits me suddenly, along with the smells of sweat and smoke. It’s dark in comparison to the daylight outside and looks like we’ve stepped into some kind of club.

  “It’s two in the afternoon, what are all these people doing here?” I say to no one in particular.

  “Stick with me!” Agnes shouts over the noise, ignoring the question. In her granny cardigan and skirt, she looks completely out of place at an Augur rave, and I try not to smile at her as she shuffles through the mass of bodies writhing and dancing around her.

  Smoke rises above the crowds and makes it impossible to see where the walls and ceiling of the room are, but I can make out the main part of the space is taken up by a huge dance floor. As we push our way through, I can see a bar at the far end, and eventually my eyes become accustomed to the darkness enough to see that there are tables and booths around the outside of the huge space. Agnes heads straight for the bar and grabs a lady’s attention, although I can’t hear what they’re saying over the din.

  Fed up of being jostled by dancers, I pull up a bar stool and look at the menu. Rather than racks of alcohol as I expected, I realise that what’s on offer is fresh juices, coffee, tea and snacks. I notice a man sitting at the bar with a lady drinking something orange with a celery stick in it and raise my eyebrows.

  “You got something to say, mate?” he calls over to me, obviously mistaking my expression for something else.

  “What? Oh no. Just wondering if your drink is good,” I say, trying not to sound nervous.

  “Oh, right,” he beckons me over, suddenly friendly, and I glance back to see Agnes disappearing into the crowd. I should probably be following her, but the man’s insistence makes it impossible to refuse him.

  “I’m Ricky.” He holds out his hand for me to shake, and I take it.

  “This is Victoria,” he introduces the lady, and she, too, shakes my hand. I know I should be wary of touching Augurs I don’t know, particularly after experiencing the mind-numbing powers of Cassie, but I just silently pray neither of them have Augur detection as their power.

  “I’m C... James,” I say, remembering my alias almost too late.

  “And what’s your power, James?” Victoria asks, looking at me through curls of blonde hair and thick eyelashes. For someone that seems to have come to a fitness rave, she’s dressed like she’s ready for a night out.

  I wrack my brains for something mundane that won’t need proving to anyone, but I come up short.

  “I don’t really like to talk about it,” I say, stalling.

  “Don’t be shy, love. My power is that I can predict the weather any day of any month of any year,” she smiles. “How boring can you get? But Ricky here is an exceptionally magical cook.” She rests a hand on his arm possessively, and Ricky leans over to give her a kiss. She giggles like a school girl, and I try not to roll my eyes.

  “This little concoction is carrot, ginger, ginseng and apple,” he says, pointing at the orange liquid.

  “Wow, sounds healthy,” I reply, now thinking I really ought to be getting back to Agnes rather than drawing attention to myself.

  “That’s not the best part,” Victoria says, taking a sip from one of the straws and giving another little laugh. “This one has Ricky’s secret ingredient in it,” she says as quietly as she can while sti
ll being heard above the din.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Ricky says, looking over his shoulder and pulling out a small vial from his jacket pocket, “one drop of this stuff makes your powers last ten times longer on a single boost.”

  I can’t disguise my shock when I realise what he’s saying. “It’s a drug?”

  “Sshh, keep your voice down. Not a drug, per se. All natural ingredients, but my own recipe that lets your body hold more energy than usual. Not like the other AES stuff they’re selling on the street. This is premium grade,” he gives me a wink.

  “AES?” I ask.

  “Where’ve you been, kid? Under a rock?”

  “Er, I’m from out of town,” I say vaguely, which is true enough. Inside and outside London are evidently as different as two separate countries right now. There’s none of the bedlam outside going on anywhere else as far as I know.

  “Ah, that explains it. Fewer dealers there. Augur Enhancement Substance. Sometimes they call it ‘Air’,” he explains. I realise I’m on dangerous territory speaking to an Augur drug dealer, considering I’m neither an Augur nor do I take drugs, but I smile in feigned interest.

  “Wow, cool.”

  “Purely recreational, you understand,” Ricky adds, hiding the vial of liquid in his palm while ordering another drink from the juice bar.

  “Of course,” I say, trying to work out a good way to get away from these people.

  “Plus,” he goes on, ignoring my agitation and nodding at the bartender when she brings another orange glass over, “it doesn’t matter what your powers are with my formula. Victoria here gets a lovely little thrill from my Air, don’t you, love?” She smiles and makes thunder and lightning motions in the air. Either she’s mad, or she’s high from the stuff. “If you get visions of the future, for example, this would bring it on stronger. If you’re a strong man, you’ll be stronger for longer on just one boost from a power source, three times longer than your average street-made Air.”

  “Is that so?” Now he really does have my interest. I didn’t know there was anything that could chemically enhance Augur performance, but I do remember Lou saying that drugs make them unpredictable. This seems like a scary combination of both.