Bitter Magic (World War Magic Book 2)

by Lee Hayton

  The second time she sent the cockroach out, confidence taking over from fear that she would lose control and lose her chance, Grainne saw a wriggle at the edge of the insect’s vision as it re-entered the house. If the strain of controlling another being hadn’t been so all-consuming, she would have sent the beetle straight back out. As it was, she had to lie down and rest for hours, and then it was too late in the day. The glimpse of something from the corner of her eye—no, its eye—tugged at her brain. There was a sense of familiarity. A recognition of something she’d seen before.

  After she’d spent a long night chatting online, avoiding the occasional fireball of disgust and hatred aimed her way, Grainne lay in bed, not sleeping. Her ups and downs of energy were ridiculous. Peaking in energy when it was time for her to be fast asleep, flaking out completely in the middle of the day.

  Anyone would think she hadn’t seen daylight in a few months.

  Eventually, her body started to relax and feel the drag of sleep, pulling her into unconsciousness. Grainne let it take her, with a sigh of relief.

  #

  From the age of six, until she left home to join the nunnery at the age of eighteen, Grainne’s room had been on the first floor of her parent’s house. The window overlooked a narrow stretch of mown lawn with a raggedy old apple tree. There was about a yard and a half between her side of the house and the neighbor’s fence.

  For long hours, in between bouts of reading and the two programs she was allowed to watch on TV, Grainne would stare out the window at her small stretch of the backyard. Eyes open, she would daydream about all the wonderful things that would happen in her life. As soon as she was out of elementary school, middle school, high school. As soon as her life truly began to start.

  She wasn’t one for making friends. Although after watching everyone around her like a hawk, the process seemed easy, when Grainne tried herself the effort always fell flat. Where she’d watch a child her own age tell a joke, and earn the instant respect of his or her peers, when Grainne tried, the punchline would earn a pained groan or, even worse, would go straight over their assembled heads.

  When she played tag in the schoolyard, no one let themselves be an easy catch. She’d have to run so hard to swat somebody else to be “it,” that all the fun of the game dropped away. Her lungs would burn, her heart would pitter-patter. Her face would flush so red that the other kids would point and laugh.

  Ridiculous. A girl in second grade once eyed Grainne up and down when she tried to sit next to her at the lunch table. The girl had sniffed, refused to move her tray to make room, and just said that one word. Ridiculous.

  It didn’t matter if she tied her hair the same, or wore the same clothes as everybody else. Even when in the middle school with a strict uniform code, Grainne stood out like a sore thumb. Or, a ragged and festering thumb, given the looks that other children would cast her way.

  As a result of her friendship repelling skills, Grainne spent a lot of time seated on her bed alone. The seasons would pass with aching slowness. The time it took for the fall leaves to turn red and yellow, purple and brown, then fall in twisting spirals down onto the ground, seemed to take years. Likewise, when the searing heat of the summer sun was overhead, it stayed there long past its welcome.

  Sitting on her bed, watching the minute changes heralding the seasons, Grainne kept her gaze—unfocused—on the same small strip of lawn.

  One day, there was a wriggle. Like a fat white glowing worm caught in the corner of her eye. She turned her head to see, but by the time her reflexes got there, it was gone.

  Nothing much. Certainly, nothing to think twice about. Except it happened again. Then again. Then again.

  One day, sheltering outside on her patch of lawn, where the house threw an elongated shadow, Grainne felt the wriggle rather than saw it. Something fat and juicy and warm with summer heat pulsated near and then in her ear.

  She jumped to her feet. Dancing in a tarantella of frantic movements. She smacked at the side of her head, hoping to shake whatever it was loose.

  Her mother finally calmed her down, long hours later. There’d been a flashlight, aimed straight down her ear canal with a pair of tweezers waiting to seize the culprit. Next, there’d been a syringe of warm water, the same warmth as the blood already pulsing too hard into Grainne’s face. Last of all, there’d been a trip to the doctor’s office where a cold stethoscope had listened first to Grainne’s heart, then been pressed up against her ear.

  Everyone agreed there was nothing to it. Maybe the poor child had felt the passage of a worm underneath her resting head and imagined the rest. Perhaps she’d fallen asleep in the warm sun and created the whole thing out of nothing.

  No one, not even Grainne, put it together with the word of God. That strangeness began so many years later that it wasn’t until he told her point blank that she understood that was the day that he got in.

  #

  “There’s a hurt man leaning against the fence in the front yard. Go to him, and heal his wounds.”

  God’s first commandment to Grainne was so emphatic, it never occurred to her not to immediately follow the order.

  She’d crawled out of her bedroom window—for some reason not wanting to walk past the lounge where her mom and dad were glued to the TV—and then slowed as she neared the fence. A man was indeed leaning against the wooden planks near the driveway gate. Right at the point where the brick pile formed a wide seat.

  Grainne wasn’t sure that God should be directing her to help the man. From the way he cradled his head and the bloodshot eyes, he was hungover rather than sick. Whatever wounds he had, were self-inflicted. Still, God propelled her forward until she touched the man’s arm and he smiled from relief.

  The same trick worked a few weeks later when Grainne’s belly was gripped with period cramps. A quick instruction from God, a light rub, and the pain was gone. It wasn’t like when she swallowed an aspirin, either. This was a true relief, sudden. There was no easing in and tapering off to wait out with clenched teeth.

  Those steps were easy, but God was strident from the get-go. Just the sort of no-nonsense pontification that characterized all religion that she’d ever seen on TV. His voice was firm, not the slightest hint of a shake or tremble. The aura surrounding his words was one of certainty. Grainne supposed that fit nicely with being the creator of all the worlds.

  As a teenage girl, having God in her head was a strange fit. With her body going haywire and her thoughts rolling deep down in the filth, Grainne was embarrassed to share the space with divinity. No matter how many Sundays she now went along to church, she couldn’t square the being in her head with the religion they touted. Everything about it was strange and new to her. Her parents weren’t even casual churchgoers, so apart from the osmosis from society, it was all a foreign subject to her.

  Yet she knew, as soon as the voice came from within her mind, that it was God. It fit with every divinity story that circulated in the general population as an urban myth. One night, she fell asleep with her usual disgruntled reluctance, the next morning she woke with another being’s voice echoing out from inside her brain.

  Her schoolwork, lackadaisical at the best of times, suddenly became so accurate and high-ranking it was almost obscene. Grainne took the unasked-for help, aced every test, yet wondered in the back of her mind if such a thing really should be happening. Why God had decided to pop the answers in her head without her even thinking to ask was strange. That he’d do it when she didn’t even care about her grades was even stranger.

  There she’d be, in history or social sciences, struggling along as usual. Suddenly, there’d be absolute clarity inside her head. The answers flowed forward, her hand would write them down on the page. When she returned home with another A, Grainne still wouldn’t even understand the question.

  When she made the decision to move into a nunnery, it made everything even worse. Grainne had arrived at a decision on her own. She’d spent her precious free time checking out th
e different retreats on offer. She’d met with mother superiors and been to lunch with novices, trying to find the perfect fit.

  All the while she was doing this, God was taking a vacation from shouting and pontificating inside her head. If she were honest with herself, it made a change from the insistence that she go places and do things at the voices beck and call. In a way, the lack of interest in her scouting attempts meant it wasn’t too much of a surprise that God didn’t agree with her decision. Arguing with him for days, prepared her well for the arguments that came afterward, with her parents. If she could shut down an internal monolog, then her mother and father never stood a chance.

  On the first day after she moved into the convent, God left and never came back. Although the voice was the main reason she’d turned in that direction, Grainne never used its absence as a reason to leave. It took her a long time to settle into the strange new life, but she knew without a doubt that to follow the same paths as her classmates would be an even harder adjustment.

  College, even training college, scared her to the very core. Spending every day trying to achieve in schoolwork she didn’t care about, while also making friends with people who would shun her—that was a definition of hell.

  In the convent, knowing things was a disadvantage, not a blessing. Being curious or aiming to be popular were sins that placed you in opposition to the main goals. Easy acceptance of everything strange, not raising an eyebrow or a question, that was the way a nun moved up the ranks.

  Grainne didn’t want to move up the ranks, but she would have been a natural fit if the hierarchy had called to her. As it was, she kept to herself, she studied one book instead of a thousand, she listened to one interpretation of one set of ideas. The fit was perfect for her mind.

  If it hadn’t been for the loneliness, she might have stayed forever. But her ability to make friends within the convent was equal to her ability outside. While others naturally fit together, giggling or offering support as the situation demanded, Grainne was left on her own. Apart from where directed to work closely with another, her life was solitary. Once again, standing on the outside looking on as everyone formed tight circles of friendship within.

  It was the memory of how it felt when God spoke to her that propelled Grainne out the convent gates one day, never to return. Looking back at the desert of personal relationships that comprised her life, that was the one point where she intersected with somebody.

  Over the years, she’d convinced herself that the voice was a hallucination. In the back of her head, though, the true memory lingered. A hallucination wouldn’t have ordered her to do things she didn’t want to. An imaginary friend wouldn’t have known the answers to so many tests.

  As she knelt in chapel one morning, Grainne thought she heard the strict tones of God again. When she turned, it was to see the mother superior, ordering a young novice to perform some duty. The same manner. The same arrogance. A flood of grief washed through Grainne as she thought of all she’d lost.

  Her bags were packed by week’s end. She left, and in a final dig at her feelings, no one tried to talk her into staying. Twenty years of living side by side, but it wasn’t worth anyone’s time to have a simple conversation.

  At night, on the outside, for weeks after she moved into her first apartment by herself, Grainne cried instead of sleeping each night. Worn out, exhausted by the constant drain on her shattered emotions, she came close to taking the coward’s way out. The same path that her great-grandfather and her older brother had taken out of their lives. A family trait, as baked into her genes as her eye color or her height.

  The library had saved her. After a lifetime spent avoiding knowledge, Grainne thirsted to read of other people’s lives. Real, imaginary, it didn’t matter to her. Long and boring, short and immersive, she would pick up and read anything.

  Then Emily. Then the book club. Two years of a life filled with someone other than herself.

  Now, once again, Grainne was all alone. Apart from her cockroach and her fear, no one and nothing touched her solitary life.

  And just like it had when she was a lonely child, she’d caught a wriggle out of the corner of her eye. Fat and squirming, glowing with an inner light. A fat worm just like the one that embedded in her ear, years before. A change that came before the word of God led her on a path of inner enlightenment. Before she headed in the wrong direction, chasing so hard after her dream.

  A fat, wriggling worm. The same as the one that had burrowed into Grainne’s brain. Sitting up late that night, eyes wide open in the darkened room, she pulled all the threads of her random thoughts together.

  It was the magic. There had never been a God whispering sweet nothings into her ear. A worm of magic had embedded itself in her flesh years earlier and had died from neglect.

  Now she had magic burned into her body. Suppressed by a wall of concrete and immosium, she could still feel its presence twist and curl. If there was a new supply waiting for her in the garden, could she call it to her?

  In the middle of a coffin where she’d been sentenced to die, could she call upon the oldest power in the universe? Hail it and pull it into her flesh until her power overwhelmed the meager shielding that the government had thrown up overnight.

  If she could haul the wriggling worms of magic into the house, into her body, would she have the power to break out?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mr. Cockroach was tired. His alien mind was fading fast. Grainne fed him more of her meal than she wanted to, hoping that the small dose of added nutrition would be enough to kick start him. If she couldn’t use her little drone pal, then once again she was back to square one.

  He rallied, but not back to the state of the last few days. Grainne tried to heal him, but there were no wounds, no injuries. Old age must come quickly to a small insect, and that wasn’t an ill she could cure, even if her powers were running at full throttle.

  In the clean air of the washroom, Grainne sent her small friend down the drain, part of her mind going with him. The tunnel seemed longer than the previous day. The curves took an age to clamber around. For a time, with legs slipping back over and over, unable to form a secure grip in the mildew covered plastic of the piping, despair bit into her heart with its sharp teeth. Nibble, nibble. She pulsed every last ounce of power at the small creature trapped in the tunnel until, finally, Grainne and the cockroach together rounded the turn and buzzed in flight, up and out to freedom.

  This time there wasn’t the nice view of the neighboring houses to ease her journey. Grainne aimed straight for where she’d seen the flashes of burrowing magic tipping their wriggling heads above the ground.

  The cockroach landed badly, turning one foot over so that it tore free of its leg. Even using her magic to ease the pain, there was nothing to heal it. The best she could manage was to form hardened scarring across the rip.

  A flash in the corner of its magnificent eyes and Grainne sent the cockroach hobbling forward. Another flash. She and the insect were now parked right on top of the spot. The earth was disturbed, tiny dried clods of dirt pushed up and out of the way as the magic had emerged.

  One small worm of magic bumped up against the belly of the cockroach. Grainne could feel it burn, well above her power to heal. The creature withdrew in startled pain, and she lost contact for a second. Her mind thumped back into herself with so much force that her teeth banged together.

  Panicked, she cast her mind out, trying to capture the cockroach within its net again. Too late. She reached the edge of its mind, but it was dying. As her own breath slowed with the ache of loss, the insect tottered and fell onto its back.

  The sun was bright in the sky above. The weird angle of its eyes showed her a panoramic view around the creature’s head. After so long staring at just her four walls, even the overgrown suburban garden of nowhere special, USA was a gorgeous symphony of color.

  It was then, as the last cells of the cockroach died, the magic found her. As though it had searched for months or
years, once it locked onto her position, it didn’t let go.

  Through the tunnel, it came for her. First one wriggling worm of light, then a dozen, a splintered beam full of glowing, flowing magic, then a wide ray. It coursed inside as though it were a liquid. It fed into Grainne’s open arms and filled her body to the brim.

  As each glowing pulse entered her, there was a burning sensation. No sooner healed then it came again. And again. Even when Grainne felt as though she would burst if anything more tried to enter her, still more magic filled her. A stream, a river, a tidal surge that encompassed her, overwhelmed her, became her at the same time as she became it.

  Hunger was gone. Tiredness was gone. Each cell in her body glowed with the magic light. It repaired her, fed her, protected her with its strange armor. The light hugged her with arms warmer than her mother’s, stronger than her dad’s.

  An odd feeling of peace and comfort fell upon Grainne. Until every moment of the past few months erupted out of her mind. Burning, seething. The bitter anger of captivity, torture, the powerlessness of sitting and watching her best friends in the world die. It poured out of her, spilling over like she was fermenting in emotion.

  When she stood up to leave the washroom, vengeance stuffed her heart full to bursting.

  Chapter Sixteen

  If Grainne stood in the center of the house, stuffed full of magic, she could feel the living minds in the suburbs surrounding her. The whirring memories and thoughts of the soldiers sent to guard her, the last bastion against any unexpected occurrences.

  The immosium kept the magic in check but only where it was applied. Now she was topped full so that magic pulsed out of her with every breath, it found the tiny cracks in the concrete. It tunneled down the drains, the pipes, it squeezed through the unsealed lip on one side of the chimney.