Bitter Magic (World War Magic Book 2)

by Lee Hayton

  Perhaps the people looking weren’t rooting for her, though. Maybe they weren’t rooting for pity-me Jane or arrogant Mary or the damned stray cat.

  The society so ruthless as to lock them up might now have a gleeful betting pool. Putting money down on when the women would all succumb to whatever horrific death killed them. It was possible that the only person rooting for Grainne was herself.

  In which case, she needed to get smarter. If she wanted to live, wanted to escape, she needed to put more effort into the game. Her entire skin was already there, time to propel her brain into action as well.

  Smarter started with a full evaluation of the tools at hand.

  First off was the basement. A faint scent of mold and damp lived down there, but apart from that, the outlook was pretty much an empty room. Rather than keep any food wrappings in the kitchen, Grainne had tossed all her rubbish down here. It was scattered in an array across the floor. Although her mind insisted she had an accurate stock-take of everything she’d tossed down here, to start with she picked through every piece of trash just to be sure.

  The smell of the oldest plastic cling film was meaty and rotting. Grainne didn’t bother to grip her nose in her fingers, though. She wasn’t a tender flower anymore.

  She should have loaded herself up to the brim with food when she had the chance. Hyped up on carbohydrates and protein, maybe she could have broken through the bricked-up walls. Too late for that now, there was no going back. It was high time she started to look forward.

  She kicked through the last of the rubbish and confirmed there was nothing useful there. Unless her tired brain could come up with a plan for escape that included a lot of used wrapping. Maybe she could put together a hundred sporks to build a weapon that would make people tremble in fear.

  Grainne sniggered at her own joke before realizing there was some merit in the idea. She didn’t have a lighter or matches, but if she held some tissue paper to the cooktop long enough, surely it would burst into flame.

  Sporks are plastic and plastic melts. Grainne could form it into any shape she liked. That stupid feeling of hope started to blossom again. From a stinking pile of garbage, she’d already drawn out the essential elements to start a weapon or a tool for escape.

  The basement floor was covered in sawdust. Often a sign that only soil lay underneath. No one needs to sweeten up concrete with wood shavings, but dirt goes sour. Pleased with the logic, Grainne attacked it with vigor, her fingers clawing through the hard impacted clay. Her hopes were destroyed the moment she touched the unmistakable porous roughness of a concrete base. What sort of numb nuts would put dirt on top of concrete? The dimwit who built this house, apparently.

  Not taking chances, Grainne repeated the same action in a couple of different places. Each time, her bloodying fingertips hit up against the unyielding surface until continuing to check became a waste of time and energy.

  The walls were next. Grainne got even less far with those. Rather than the plasterboard covering a skeleton of wood that was upstairs, down in the cellar the walls were cinderblock backed with earth-toned bricks. There was no way she’d get through those.

  As a reward for her diligent proof that the basement wasn’t a path to freedom, Grainne moved upstairs. The rank scent from the old food wrappings had permeated her clothing. A faint taste lingered in her mouth like carrion, a snippet of death.

  The camera feed in the cellar would have caught her every action. Grainne hoped someone was chuckling themselves to death at her expense rather than sorting out a plan for her elimination. She could imagine a viewer, fat buttocks sliding over the edge of their chair. Seated in dim light, their bulging eyes glued to the screen. Using orange-stained fingertips to shove another Cheeto into a gaping mouth.

  Someone nibbling away at snacks, so satiated with food that they barely taste it. That was Grainne’s enemy. That was her imprisoner. The imaginary form solidified the more she dwelled on the idea. That was the person she wanted to bludgeon to death.

  If somebody grew worried about her attempted escape, one of them might be foolish enough to gain entry. The other alternative didn’t bear thinking about but having started on the roller-coaster ride they were now helpless to get off. Grainne could imagine them cracking open the concrete seal across the chimney. She could almost smell the gasoline pouring in a stream before the flick of a Zippo lighter ignited them into flame.

  Stop it!

  The thoughts were too close to the bad memory, the one she couldn’t let anybody see. Grainne shook her head violently, shaking the course of her thinking loose. Her reality was bad enough. She needed to focus on what she could do here and now.

  The cabinets in the kitchen were made of wood so light it reminded her of the balsa wood from school woodworking classes. Only the shaped plastic that was glued around the edges gave them firm definition. Even if she unscrewed a door, the panel would break as soon as she struck it against the concrete.

  This cookie cutter house seemed to be no use to her, but Grainne still kept on searching. The coffee table was the heaviest piece of furniture that she could mobilize—unlike the three-seat sofa and her bed. Certainly, it was heavy enough that she grew tired just dragging it across to the living room window. Gritting her teeth, she expended the last of her energy picking it up and tossing it as hard as she could. It smashed against the glass and bounced back. Long shards from the window dropped down onto the carpeted floor.

  After pulling a folded handkerchief from her pocket and wrapping it around her hand, Grainne stooped to lift up one of the glass daggers to examine it. She tilted it back and forth, making the reflection of the overhead lightbulb glint and glimmer with evil intent.

  Against concrete, the shard would be no match. But against the tender skin of her wrist or inner thigh, it would be plenty. Grainne set it down carefully on the kitchen counter, then changed her mind and secured it inside a cupboard. She didn’t want to think ahead to where its sharpened edge could be pressed into her skin and drawn along her artery. Lacking a bath, she could envisage sitting on the shower floor to let the water pelt her and keep her warm as the blood flowed from her body.

  Back in her bedroom, Grainne looked at the tangled sheets. She always left them in the same disgraceful mess that she woke within each morning. The one advantage to her captivity, she didn’t need to waste her precious time on housework. Here, there was no threat that any guests were going to drop by, unexpectedly or not.

  Once upon a time, her mother’s face would have creased in worry at the undone chore. She would have chewed her lip until it bruised into purple-red. Grainne’s mother had always been more concerned about what others thought of her than of what she thought of others. Even though Grainne had tried to escape the same fate, apples don’t fall far from trees.

  The twisted, unkempt, bedsheet could easily be fashioned into a noose around her neck. Even if she didn’t know what she’d tie the other end onto, it still offered potential to escape the stinging, sickening pain from a deep cut.

  Once every room had been checked, Grainne sat down in front of her computer. It was pleasing to think the day hadn’t been wasted. Why, if starvation didn’t get her, she had two new ways of getting herself.

  In the hours during which she’d been scouring the property, gravity had finally tipped Jane forward. Instead of facing the shattered profile of her destroyed head from a distance, the webcam now peered straight into the blasted remnants of her skull.

  Grainne stared in horrified fascination. There was a white smudge deep in the center of the grainy image. She stared in confusion while her memory working through all she recalled of anatomy. Was it part of Jane’s brain, part of her skull, a glimpse of her brain stem or spine poking out. It shouldn’t matter, it didn’t matter, but still, Grainne wanted to figure out the perplexing contours.

  She didn’t know how much time passed before remembering the collection of sporks waiting for action on the kitchen counter. Too much time, was the best guess that she
had.

  Grainne crammed a handful of the plastic cutlery into a ceramic mug. She perched it directly on the cooktop and turned an element on full blast. After a while, the mug cracked as it expanded in the heat. A terrible stink of burning rose into the air. The scent was cloying, overwhelming, but she persisted with the task. It was working, the stiff shapes were melting into swaying sticks that curled in upon themselves.

  Grainne grabbed a pair of oven gloves out of the drawer, ready to shape the melting plastic into a much sharper weapon. As the sporks melted down, she turned on the cold tap. All ready to thrust whatever masterpiece she managed to craft into the flow of water to cool, so it held its shape.

  She was poised, choking on the acrid smoke but ready.

  Then the lights went out. The stovetop winked off. The power had been cut.

  Chapter Seven

  The choking smoke immediately seemed to intensify. Grainne shoved the mug under the cold tap, shaping its contents forgotten in a desperate bid to stop the poison contaminating the air. She backed away, overwhelmed with the bite of smoke and fighting off the choking sensation of claustrophobia. In the darkness, she quickly lost her bearings.

  She needed to get upstairs, into the bedroom. A place where she could close the door firmly so the noxious smoke wouldn’t fill the room. When she headed in the direction she thought the stairs were, Grainne tripped over the end of the caber-tossed coffee table instead.

  Her head smashed hard against the floor. Carpet or not, it felt as hard as a stone. The lights came back on, but only inside her head as it swam with stars and blinding flashes on her retinas.

  A burning pain started in her lungs as she drew in smoke only to cough it back out again. Panic flooded her like a tsunami carrying her away in a wash of dirty water, it made her head spin in dizzy circles. Grainne stayed on her hands and knees, crawling across the floor. She hoped to make a lucky strike upon her target, all sensation of direction was lost. This time, she went too far the other way, butting her head into the opposite wall. She cried out, the muffled noise loud and jarring in the darkness. Scaring her, even though the sound issued from inside her.

  The nibbles of panic, ever present, intensified until Grainne’s stomach was a roiling mess of pain. It twisted and pulled, stretched beyond endurance. She could see her heartbeat in her eyes. Her shaken retinas pulsed with each beat. Agony radiated up her chest, up her jaw, it dug into the temporal joint below her ear.

  If it were a heart attack, Grainne would almost have welcomed it. Death would be a relief from the sudden, chaotic suffering. It was a panic attack, though. An old friend. She gasped for air as her heartbeat doubled, tripled, beat so fast it was like a hum rather than a patter.

  Her mouth gaped open, and saliva dripped from loose lips down onto the back of her hand. The sensation was almost lost as she fought against the overwhelming crush of dread.

  She wanted to die. She believed she was dying. She wanted it to be over, once and for all.

  Grainne wanted the fucking lights to come on so that she could see.

  After a few minutes, she turned, so she was perched on her bum with her back jammed against the wall. She closed her useless eyes and tilted her head forward to rest on her raised knees. For long minutes, she concentrated on nothing but her breathing. After another spate of coughing from the harsh smoke, she pulled her sweatshirt up and over her head. The heavy fabric should have felt like it was choking her, but the filtered air was such sweet relief to her lungs that it was freeing instead.

  The computer.

  She should be able to see the light from the laptop computer. In the darkness, Grainne opened her eyes and strained to see a shape. All she saw were the flashes of colors sparking from her corneas when she squeezed her eyelids shut.

  With the sweatshirt hooked in place to leave her arms free, she began to crawl at a slow pace forward across the carpet. When her head unexpectedly bumped into the soft edge of the couch, she forced herself to stop. With one hand, she traced its shape until her mind formed a map of exactly where she was in the room.

  The card table with the laptop should be behind her. Grainne turned and felt its hard edge with a sense of overarching relief. With one arm fixed on the sofa, she slid the other up the edge of the card table, leaning forward eagerly. After a moment, she was rewarded with the touch of the laptop’s warm plastic underneath her fingertips.

  Edging her hand forward in slow circles, she felt the edge of the keyboard. She pressed a random key, hoping the screen would light up. Nothing happened. Grainne scanned her fingers over the low-set buttons until she found the tiny raised lines that heralded the F and J keys. The QWERTY layout flashed up in her mind, and she moved up the rows until she reached the power button. Holding her breath, she pressed it.

  Again, nothing happened.

  Her heart lurched in her chest, though she expected it. She’d never turned the damn thing off—it was her one life-line. If its monitor was dark after pressing a key, the power button was a feeble hope. With that dream now extinguished, she raised the laptop and slid her fingers under to feel the battery compartment was clicked into place.

  The laptop hadn’t worked off battery power when Grainne first located it. At the time, she’d assumed it just needed to be charged up. Since then, there hadn’t been a need to run it away from the mains power before. She couldn’t recall ever checking the battery icon to see if it needed attention.

  Her last link to the world was broken. Her one hope of eventual communication was gone.

  Grainne truly plunged into the waiting darkness.

  Chapter Eight

  When Grainne came back to full consciousness, her terrified screams were still echoing off the unseen walls of her cage. Her throat was hoarse and clicked when she swallowed a lump of spit that had coagulated in her mouth. She needed a drink of water.

  It was with that thought she realized the tap was still running in the kitchen, pouring its bounty over the charred plastic. The weapon Grainne could no longer believe would aid in her release. A sudden thought intruded into her head. The water would be the next thing to go. Cut off from the main supply. No longer flowing freely through the taps. It would slow to a trickle and then to nothing.

  A bright, white shard of fear plunged into her brain. Grainne panted as her heartbeat sped up, her lungs unable to cope with the new demands of her blood stream. Panic ate its way up from the soles of her feet to the top of her scalp.

  When she finally moved, action cut off some of the increasingly frantic speed of her internal systems. The movement dissipated the stockpiling adrenalin, using it to fuel her forward motion instead. It was easy to find her way through to the kitchen. The floor plan stayed mapped correctly inside her head this time, aided by the sound of water pouring from the taps.

  Once her knees hit the linoleum tiles, she stood and levered herself up from the floor. Grabbing the edge of the bench, it was easy work to reach the sink. Grainne found the ceramic mug and tipped the water and melted plastic out of it. Once empty, she filled it full, until drops leaked over the side to splash against her hand. She turned the tap off and drank the water, gulping it down in large swallows. Her throat gave one aborted protest, then changed its tune.

  The simple accomplishment drove Grainne’s panic back into hiding. She poured another mugful up to the brim, then carried it carefully back to the couch.

  Time passed. She felt a craving to know exactly how much had passed by. She could tick off her pulse rate, count seconds in her head. Without a clock, though, there was no way to truly know.

  Once, in high school, a teacher had performed an experiment with Grainne’s science class. In order to highlight the nature of individual perception, Mr. Bromley asked each pupil to close their eyes. Once shut, he ordered them to count off a minute in their heads and raise their hand when they thought the allotted time had passed.

  Ever the ace student, Grainne had done exactly as she was told. She’d always been a reliable and conscientious stu
dent. The seconds ticked by in her head—one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi. She held her hand up and waited tensely when sixty-Mississippi was done.

  When the pause seemed to stretch on forever, her teenaged brain had run through a list of shameful possibilities. That she was the only one with her eyes closed while everyone else in the class pointed and laughed, chief among them. After an eternity, Mr. Bromley clapped his hands and said, “Open your eyes now.”

  Grainne’s eyes had popped open to scan the classroom, relief flooding her as she saw the other students doing the same. Her arm was tired, and she let it drop as soon as she saw another girl performing the action. She clasped her hands together in front of her, pressing hard to quell the rush of anxiety the teacher’s instructions had triggered.

  The results that Mr. Bromley had scribbled down were transposed onto the blackboard at the head of the classroom. He quickly tallied up and averaged out the timings to prove his point. Thirty-nine seconds. That was the average minute that the classroom had come up with. The bell curve hit the sweet spot and gently rose up and down with a few outliers.

  One student among the entire class of twenty-eight had hit upon the correct timing. Mr. Bromley had left them all there, hands raised, for long enough that none of them knew who could claim that distinction.

  It wasn’t Grainne. She knew enough to know that for sure. She’d been steady and average her entire life. No special accolades were ever destined for her door.

  Round that up to forty seconds and where did that leave her now? Sitting in the dark, her head spinning with anxiety and low-grade terror. Forty seconds where every minute’s passing left her less far along in this torment than she would think.

  Not that it mattered. Grainne’s mind poked at the problem just for the few moments of distraction that it offered. In the end, whether her perception of time was spot on, or only two-thirds towards the whole didn’t make a jot of difference. She hadn’t been issued with a time-limit. There was no telling when the lights would come back on again. Or even if they would.