by May Dawney
“W-What are you doing? I cannot move? I cannot move a thing!” He was becoming frantic now.
“Helping you over the wall.” She made him lean forward.
He yelped.
“And be quiet.” She followed the command with another flick of her wrist.
His cry cut off.
“Better.” She licked her lips. Another quick movement of fingers and her magic willed his body to do what she desired of him. It was a lengthy process, but she got him onto the wall, then down onto the trash bins below, feet first. As soon as his feet touched the ground, she let her energy fall away.
He sank onto the tile in a moaning heap.
Her inner mage whined; magical energy pushed up to be released.
She pushed her knees against the wall on either side for stability and pressed her fists against her chest to contain herself as she fought to catch her breath. Tempest’s gaze on her forced her to regain control, but she felt shaky and her body and brain still sang with magic. She had to stop using it soon, because it was becoming far too easy to give in.
“Viktoria?” He reached up to touch her ankle.
She pulled her foot away. “I-I’m fine. I’ll be back.” She hastened down and almost missed her footing. A rush of adrenaline made her woozy again, but she managed to hold onto the wall with her fingertips and dropped down with a small thud.
Gigi was still a boneless mess, but since the yard was secluded, they had a few moments of respite for him to recover.
“I’m going to move somewhere less suspicious. Yell in case you need me.” Tempest’s voice was accompanied by his heavy footfalls.
She didn’t respond. Her gaze was on Gigi, who still hadn’t gotten up.
He moaned.
“You are not in pain. In fact, the effect should have long worn off. Get up.” She prodded him with the toe of her shoe.
He inched away from the press.
“Get. Up.”
Still naught but a wiggle.
“Get up or I’ll make you get up.”
His eyes flew open and he rolled onto his back to look up at her.
She raised an eyebrow and folded her arms in front of her chest, just in case he got the idea that she was joking. “I’ll march you up the stairs if I have to.”
“N-No!” He scrambled to his feet, swayed, but his battered muscles held him. “I-I’m up, creepy lady. I’m up.”
“Great!” She smiled sweetly. “After you, then.” She extended her arm toward the door.
He glanced at it before he sighed and put himself into motion. “Is this house safe?”
She waited for him to pull the door open and walk into the hallway. “Probably not.” She bit back a smirk when he whirled around. “100,000 zloty. You’ll get no more of it if you walk away now.”
Her reminder had the desired effect. He slumped, and nodded. “Ah, yes. You make good point. Very good point.” He turned back to take it all in. “Up?”
“Up, indeed. I want to see what happened here during the explosion. You can tell me, right?”
He hummed. “Yes, yes.” His tone had gone oddly airy, which was either really good, or really bad.
“What is it? Spit it out.” She followed him up the rickety steps, but made sure to stay four steps between him, just so she wouldn’t go down with him if he fell through.
“For another, say, 50,000 zloty, I can show you what happened.” He tapped the side of his brainpan. “Right inside your head.”
“You want to read my thoughts?” She couldn’t help but laugh at the thought that she would ever allow him into her brain.
“No, no.” He reached the hallway on the first floor and turned around. “I can put the memory of what happened here inside your brain. I do not read brain, I add to brain.”
“Right.” She considered that as she walked up the last steps. “Are there risks?”
“No risks.” He shook his head. “It just costs extra.”
She considered that. It might help to see the faces of the people she was hunting. It might help a lot, actually. 50,000 zloty wasn’t spare change, but it wasn’t an issue. “All right, deal.” She shook his hand, then wiped hers on her pants. “It’s on the left.”
He laughed. “Yes, yes. Big surprise.” He ducked down under the police tape and looked around. “Well, I can tell you something for free: this was not an explosion of gas.”
“Yes, I know.” She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “I want to see the bedroom, that seems to have been the epicenter.”
He walked over to the other room and looked inside. “Impressive magic.” He whistled. “Very impressive.”
“If you’re done admiring the view…?”
“Ah, yes! 150,000 zloty, yes?”
“Yes, and you show me everything there is to see. You don’t stop until I tell you to stop.”
“All right, all right.” He waved her off. “Come, stand in front of me.”
She eyed him.
“I will not touch your female parts.” He grinned, now seemingly in his element and fully recovered. “Come, I need to have my hands on your head and you need to see the room, else you won’t see anything at all.”
After another moment of hesitation, she stepped in front of him, but turned around right away for a glare when she felt his belly press against her back.
“What?” He raised both hands. “I did not even touch yet!”
“Oh, you touched me!” She turned around, however, and allowed him close again.
“Maybe I touched you a little.” He grinned, then before she could protest, put his hands over her ears like headphones and the world fell out from under her. She was cast into pitch blackness. Vertigo left her with a sensation of falling down a long, cold well, but she didn’t land in water. Instead, the world flickered into view like on an old TV-screen with an adjustable antenna; it distorted for a few moments, then settled.
The room had restored itself. The ceiling was up, the glass sat in the windows, and a twenty-something year old covered in tattoos stumbled into the doorway. Bright blonde hair, skinny jeans, plain white shirt. She got some water, fished her cell phone out of her bag, then put both on the nightstand before she fell onto the bed, face first.
Her calm didn’t hold. Before long, she rolled onto her back, then back onto her side. She groaned and arched. Obviously, she was in pain and she kept staring at her hands and arms like they were on fire, but Viktoria couldn’t see a thing wrong with them.
Zaleska screamed and gripped the bedding as she arched off it, à la ‘The Exorcist’. The glass of water fell to the ground and shattered. Her phone rattled on the nightstand. The glass sung in the window frames—then they blew out. An unseen but tangible ripple mashed every object in the room together as if they’d all molten and solidified in a second.
The roof came down, but the slates slid off an invisible cocoon of energy around Zaleska and crashed to the floor instead.
The girl’s scream cut off and her body went limp. There was no dust to settle; it had all been swept up and turned to liquid. Eerie silence settled instead.
Viktoria waited, heart in her throat. Had anyone ever witnessed a wild mage manifestation? How could the Zaleska girl possibly have survived this? Even in her unconscious state, she looked tormented.
She looked well and truly dead, but she wasn’t, was she?
Viktoria’s attention was taken up by the girl so completely that she only realized Gigi was fast-forwarding when he stopped and vertigo set in.
Another person had entered the room; Viktoria heard her when she spoke.
Her heart stopped. Cold sweat ran down her back long before she could turn her head to confirm what she already knew. She’d spent hours listening to this woman talk. She knew her speech patterns, the way she never used contractions, the soulfulness of her voice. She could still hear her sing.
Noah.
Her Noah.
Every hair on her body stood on end as she took her in. Still tall and bulky, still
bald, still beautiful in a masculine, handsome kind of way. She didn’t look to have aged a day—or well, a week, maybe.
Viktoria’s legs threatened to give out. She looked on in shock as Noah Otieno took in the scene of carnage with her phone to her ear. She watched as Noah slid the phone into her back pocket and checked the Zaleska girl’s pulse. She experienced her shock with her when Zaleska groaned.
“Y-You are alive?” The dark tones washed over Viktoria and had the same startling effect on her as they had on the girl.
What was Noah doing here? How had she gotten here so fast? Had she been in Kraków already? Why? All these questions raced through her head and she had no way of getting answers to any of them, because Noah wasn’t really here. This was a place-memory and Noah could be anywhere in the world again—with the wild mage.
Her brain lagged behind on the events transpiring before her. She saw them—Noah brought Zaleska water, then lifted her onto her shoulder—but she didn’t register them. She was lost in memories and emotions, and in the shock of seeing the only person she had ever truly loved, the woman who represented both the best and the worst period of her life, connected to the one thing that would keep her in a strong position within the Inquisitio.
She laughed, she couldn’t help it. It was too poetic, too much of a karmic joke played by an unseen and unloving God. Was that what this would boil down to again? Would she be forced to choose once more between Noah and the Inquisitio? Would her choice be different now that she’d spent twenty years growing up?
“Walk.”
It took her several seconds before she recognized Gigi’s voice. His belly pressed against her back.
She frowned, but then realized they were rapidly losing sight of Noah and the boneless wild mage flung along her shoulder. They were heading out the door.
Viktoria walked, with Gigi’s hands on the side of her head. When they reached the hallway, Noah had carried the wild mage down several steps. Then, as if invisible smoke tore them from view, they disappeared.
“W-Where are they? Where did they go?” She didn’t recognize her own voice; too high-pitched, too frantic. Too young. And worse: she knew the answer. She knew Noah’s magic down to her bones.
“I can only see what you see.” Gigi didn’t seem concerned. “They used magic to make themselves invisible.”
Viktoria swallowed her raging heart back down. “B-But…” She needed to see! She needed to know where Noah had taken the wild mage—she needed to see Noah again. The glimpses had been too sudden, too short, too far in the past. They could have been part of her memories for all the good they did her. “Follow them.”
“How? Besides, there are cameras outside. They will see.” Gigi chuckled. “We look weird, you know?”
Viktoria took a few deep, steadying breaths. “L-Let me go.”
He did, and the empty apartment building came back into view.
Viktoria sank to the floor and pulled her legs up so she could rest her forehead on her knees. She couldn’t comprehend this. The past she’d so meticulously locked away was right here, impossible to ignore, and going after the wild mage meant going after Noah.
Noah, who was a shadow mage, who could disappear into the shadows at will—of course, she’d known that and yet, seeing it happen had left her in a state of panic because she needed to see. Not only did she need to know where Noah had gone, she needed to look into her eyes, examine every inch of her skin, touch her, to believe that she was real.
She’d put Noah so far into her past that she could very well have been dead, but she wasn’t. She was alive, she was in Kraków—or at least, she had been—and she had the wild mage.
She pushed her hand into her coat pocket and wrapped it around the gemstone she’d forgotten all about until now. Amethyst, for tranquility.
She could use some of that right now.
CHAPTER TEN
Be not afraid of the power of a witch. It crumples when they are tortured. Run them through and they will die. They are but human, and they lack discipline. They are ruled by their emotions, and you can use that to your advantage.
Lure them out of hiding, expose them in front of the town, and make an example of them. Do not shy away from inflicting pain. Each cry will serve as a reminder to the rest that we are always hunting.
– Rudolf Wagner, ‘A Guide for the Death of Witches’
“SO I GET my money now? You happy?” Gigi inspected her with the weary look of a man who’d seen plenty of people go insane.
Viktoria took a deep breath. “N-No, not yet. We need to find them.” She unwrapped her arms and forced herself up.
“Um, lady, you saw. They are gone. Magic. Poof.” He made a gentle explosion motion with his hands.
“They must be somewhere. Noah can’t hold a full invisibility for long; it takes too much energy.” Well, it did, twenty years ago. Who knew what she was capable of today if she’d kept practicing.
A stab of longing and jealousy set her chest ablaze. That was the life she’d wanted, but one that she had been denied. One that the Society had denied her—the Society Noah had chosen over her.
“Well, we don’t know where she went. It would take all night, maybe all day—and it might not be something I can find at all.” He shook his head. “You are crazy, lady.” He tapped his skull, then started toward the stairs. “I will ta—”
“400,000 zloty. I’ll pay your original price.”
He froze, then turned. His eyes had gone wide and they’d glazed over. She could almost see him doing the math. 400,000 zloty was undoubtedly more money than he’d earn in his lifetime, and it would buy him all the beer he could ever hope to drink. Well, with his apparent habit, half a year. Maybe.
“For what? Because we will not find them. We will not.”
He was wise to try to impress that on her, but she shook her head, regardless. “We’ll find them. But all right, a contract should have boundaries…”
She did the math. If—big if—Noah and the Zaleska girl were still in Kraków, they wouldn’t remain here for long. If Gregorios Senna was still the bastard he had always been, then he wouldn’t trust anyone but himself to watch over the wild mage. With the way that man had weaseled his way up the Society food chain, he’d undoubtedly still be in power at the London Charter, if not everywhere else as well.
The logical thing for him to do was to try to get the wild mage to London, especially after the Inquisitio had tracked down his daughter.
She still wasn’t over the fact that Anderson’s entire squad had been overtaken by a single mage. Senna’s daughter, but still a single mage. Part of her hoped Reisch flayed him alive for his failures.
That was a thought for the future, though. What mattered now was the wild mage. If she and Noah were still in Kraków, they would leave either tonight or tomorrow. Any later was a risk Gregorios would never allow. So, if they hadn’t found them by that time, there was no use in searching all over Kraków anyway.
“Tomorrow this time; dusk. If we haven’t found them by then, you get your money. If you find them before that time, you get your money and I’ll add another 100,000 zloty.” It couldn’t hurt to buy a bit more loyalty.
His eyes widened even more, and he nodded before he could possibly have processed what she’d said. “Deal! 550,000 zloty if I find them, but 450,000 zloty if I do not find them, but I look really hard.”
She held out her hand. “That’s the deal, yes.”
It took two tries for him to grab her hand, but once he got it, he shook it with vigor.
* * *
“We’re here.” Viktoria held her thumb over the heavily zoomed in Google map of Kraków she’d pulled up on her phone. “They could have headed in any direction, so I suggest we walk you around in widening circles until we stumble upon something. You’ll have to account for time passed, but—”
“Hush, I am seer, yes? I know how to timewalk. That is what I do.”
Gigi glared at her, but she suspected his anger had less to do w
ith her suggestion of how he should apply his magic than the fact that she’d pushed him off the wall and into Tempest’s waiting arms instead of helping him over with dignity.
“I will do all of that, but with a beer. I am thirsty.”
Viktoria bit back her annoyance in the face of another delay and checked the map. “There is a market over there.” She pointed down the alleyway. “Get a beer, come back, you can drink while walking.”
He huffed. “You um, how to say? You drive slaves!”
“I’m a slave driver?” She snorted. “Hardly. I’m letting you have your beer, aren’t I?”
He puffed out his chest and turned on his heel. “You need me, lady. You shouldn’t forget that the mighty Gigi is helping you find your magic girl and her negro friend.”
“Hey!” Her arm came up without her conscious permission and he froze in place. “What did you just say?” She brought her hand back toward her body and he began to walk back in staccato, jerky steps. “What did you just call her?”
“Viktoria…” Tempest’s tone held a warning.
Her blood was boiling and her magic surged with it. She shut Tempest out as she yanked Gigi back toward her.
“I-I said nothing! Let me go, you crazy—”
She squeezed her hand shut and he gurgled. Victoria focused all her attention on his throat, on forcing the muscles to swell, on closing his damn airways off. How dare he speak about Noah that way! How dare he!
Her magic rejoiced; like a living entity, it rushed from her fingers to him in invisible strings that she could feel but not see. She spun him around and reveled in his bulging eyes, in his frantic attempts to scratch at his own throat, in his red face that slowly turned blue.
“That’s enough.” Tempest’s voice was calm as always. His hand landed heavily on the back of her neck and his fingers closed around it, thumb on one side, fingers on the other. “Don’t force me to make you pass out.”
Her chest heaved. She was lightheaded even without him depriving her of oxygen.