They were getting closer.
“Are you alright?” he asked Lily.
Lily nodded. She had her hand over her mouth but she dropped it now. “Yeah I just… I wasn’t ready for that.”
Damien nodded. “We just have to be on our toes.”
“I will be. I’m sorry. I was just lost in thought.”
They continued down the hall, not once stopping to look back at the gruesome scene in the cell they had just passed. But he could still hear the blood slopping off the bars and splatting against the ground now and again. The mental image caused him to shudder.
“What were you thinking about?” Damien asked, trying to direct his mind away from what he had just seen.
“The compound,” Lily said.
The Compound, Damien thought, another reason to shudder. “You shouldn’t be thinking about it.”
“I can’t help it. Everything that’s happened… how did they even find us?”
“We don’t know that they found us.”
“You really think this has nothing to do with them?”
He did. His family had to have been involved. If not, who else? Damien shook his head.
“They found us, Damien. I don’t know how, but they found us.”
“We always knew they would come back one day. Uncle Brian and Aunt Clara weren’t the kind of people to leave things alone.”
Though not blood related, back in Oregon Damien and Lily used to live in, everyone who wasn’t blood was an aunt, an uncle, or a cousin. The High Magus, Brian, had been Uncle Brian growing up. Besides having a slight temper problem and a need to instill discipline in his kids like they were soldiers in his platoon, Damien hadn’t ever been given a reason not to like him.
Until the night he decided Lily would marry his son Henry.
That was the thing about the Compound. The High Magus and his council ran things and took care of the big decisions “for the good of all”. Oftentimes those decisions ranged from the trivial—whose turn is it to milk the cows?—to the grand—who is going to marry, and have a child with, who? Unless you were on the Council you didn’t get a say, and even then the final decision still fell on the High Magus’ shoulders. Damien’s family didn’t particularly have a lot of clout, so when the Magus decided to wed his son to Lily, the Colts chose not to question it.
After all, it meant prosperity for the family and future grandchildren.
Damien hadn’t fully come into his heritage as a Witch then, but he had witch-dreams often enough. Prophetic ones. And Lily had learned to trust them when no one else would give him the time of day. So when Damien dreamt of her wedding to Henry ending in blood and pain, Lily didn’t dismiss him. She had always disliked the know-it-all, crow-faced boy anyway and had no intention of marrying him.
Considering what happened on the night they made their escape from that dreadful place, it wouldn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to believe the High Magus had followed them all the way down from Oregon to enact his revenge. Only he hadn’t hit Damien with his hex as he had intended to; he had hit Natalie. An innocent.
Damien’s stomach twisted into a knot and his heart… it felt like someone had squeezed it.
“Are you alright?” Lily asked. She had noticed.
“Yeah,” he said, “It’s just now you’ve got me thinking.”
“This wasn’t your fault,” she said, “None of this was your fault.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“And I’m going to repeat it forever. What happened tonight couldn’t have been avoided. He would have found you wherever you were.”
“I just hate that this happened to her.”
“I know. I do too. Natalie was—is—such an awesome, sweet girl.”
She is, Damien thought. And for the first time since they had met, the thought of exploring the curve of Natalie’s cheek and the shape of her lips with his fingertips, of holding hands at the park and sharing a hot dog, of watching a movie together on the sofa, none of it felt like something to stay away from. In fact, he would have given anything to be back at the apartment right now, sitting with Natalie at his side.
Natalie and her honey and cinnamon scent.
Damien stopped. Sniffed. Looked.
“What is it?” Lily asked.
“Can you smell that?”
“The blood? No. Thank the Gods.”
“No, not that.”
Damien spun around in a three-sixty degree arc and tried to get a better lock on the smell. It was strongest in the direction of an open hallway, so strong in fact that if he hadn’t known what he was looking at was a cell-block he would have mistaken it for a bakery. Which cell-block it was, though, he didn’t know. He couldn’t read the lettering or understand the number written on the wall next to the door.
Fucking dreams, he thought.
“She’s there,” he said, “Right down there. I can smell her.”
“You can smell her?” Lily asked, sniffing. Then she caught the scent, and her eyes widened. “Holy hell!”
Damien started to rush across the cell-block, racing toward the door, but it was closing! He threw his hands up as if to push the door away, to hold it open, imagined a torrent of water at his back, and sent a wave of dizzying Power into it. His body shook as the Magick worked through him and for a moment it seemed like his Power wasn’t strong enough, but the door swung open again hard and fast and Damien slipped through the break.
Lily slipped in after Damien, narrowly avoiding hitting her shoulder against the wall as she flew through the gap, but then the door shut behind them.
And they didn’t need to be told they weren’t alone.
Chapter Nine
This cell-block has teeth.
Damien pressed his hand against the side of his head and for the first time winced from the dull throb beating beneath his fingers. It was as if the very sight unfolding before him were eating at his grey matter and sending him headlong into some kind of mad oblivion. But he didn’t have the time to wonder about his own mental health.
The cell-block had teeth, literal mouths in place of barred doors, and they were all gnashing, chattering, slavering, and howling. Some had lips, others just folded, crooked skin. Most were hurling obscenities and blasphemies in a cacophony of whispers too meek to be coming out of openings as tall as doors.
There was a man in the cell-block, too; someone in a uniform was sauntering down the row of gnashing mouths and rattling a baton against teeth as he passed them. The recognition was instant. Damien’s cousin Henry wasn’t a particularly noteworthy man, but he was tall, stork thin, and had a long nose which, along with a full head of black hair, sometimes made him look like a crow.
And like a crow, his eyes were reflective and bright.
“Inmate,” he said, pointing his baton toward them. “You’re out of your cells.”
“Damien,” Lily said, “Stay behind me.”
He didn’t argue with her, but not because he didn’t want to. His body was taut as and tense as a guitar string and he simply couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. It had been his cousin who came for him in the alley, his cousin who concocted whatever spell he used to keep Natalie trapped inside her own mind.
Natalie.
“We’re not inmates,” Lily said.
“You are now,” he said, approaching. “Like what I’ve done with the place?”
“Where is Natalie?”
“That shouldn’t matter to you, sweetheart. What should matter to you is what’s going to happen next.”
“And what’s that?”
“Why spoil the surprise? It’ll be here soon enough.”
“The Dark Fire?”
A sly grin spread across Henry’s lips, which looked cracked and broken from where Damien stood. “It’s coming for you,” he said. “I called it, just like you two little bastards did.”
“We didn’t call it,” Damien said, stepping forward. “Your dad called it.”
“And you made him lose control
of it!” A line of spittle ran down his lips when he spoke.
“He was going to kill that kid, Henry.”
“And that would have been the only person to have died if you hadn’t gotten involved, you little shit.”
Damien could feel his heart racing. Every pump sent daggers of pain to the side of his head, but he shut them out. He could hear rumbling now, from outside, and that wasn’t good. He could also hear the roar of the crowd, that night at the Compound, as the witches gathered around the pyre venerated the High Magus in a language unknown to human tongues. The boy was a lamb, and the Magus was about to summon the wolf that would devour him and take his soul away.
The boy’s terrified face still stalked his dreams sometimes, even though they had saved his life that night.
“You stood there,” Lily said, her voice soft, “And you watched, Henry. You just watched. How could you stand by and let him do what he was going to do to that poor boy?”
“It was a gift, Lilith. A gift to the Crone. As she reaps, so do we sow. When she is happy, we flourish.”
“The Crone doesn’t take human lives like that!”
“Oh but she does,” Henry said, “She takes lives, Lilith. The Crone is a hungry hag, and we feed her to placate her. To have her blessings. To keep her happy with her servants. We, her mothers, fathers, and children. Her hands and warriors. Her chosen.”
“You were never chosen for anything,” Lily spat, “And neither was that piece of shit father of yours.”
“Watch it,” Henry said, lowering his head and scowling. “Watch your fucking tongue.”
“You’re just like him,” Lily said, “The Dark Fire was a curse. He turned mad with power when he stole a secret he shouldn’t have ever learned. It got him killed, Henry. Not us. We deflected his magick away from the innocent life he was about to snuff out.”
“And doomed my father in the process.”
“You speak of him like he was an innocent. He was the one who summoned the Dark Fire to begin with, not me. No one should play with that kind of magick and you know that. Or at least you would if you were real.”
Real? Damien thought. What did she mean by that?
“Fuck you,” Henry said.
She was on to something, even if Damien didn’t know exactly how or what. “How much of himself did the real Henry put into making you?” Lily asked.
“Enough to do what I have to do.”
“And what’s that? Torment an innocent young witch who had nothing to do with any of this?”
“The Dark Fire was meant for Damien or for you. Not her. But I’ll settle.”
“Big man,” she said, mocking. “Strong man. I bet you’ve made Henry really proud.”
Damien, the voice came into his mind like an echo in an empty room.
Lily? He thought.
This thing isn’t real. I’m going to distract it, but you have to get Natalie. You have to wake her up; it’s the only way to get us all out safely before the Dark Fire comes.
“I don’t have to prove anything,” Henry said.
“Sure you do. You have to prove to me that you can take a punch.”
Damien felt the ripple in the Currents an instant before Henry grimaced and doubled over. Lily’s hands were at her side, balled into fists, and the Power was surging through her; riding on the back of her anger. He could see, with his mind’s eye, the way her ethereal form had leapt out of her own body and drawn a fist into Henry’s stomach. A psychic strike, Damien thought.
“Bitch,” Henry said when he recovered. He ran at her, baton raised, and took a swing. Lily ducked to the left and Damien staggered away. The baton went wide and Henry stumbled, but in a moment he was at it again, the black nightstick flashing and cutting the air. Then Lily started to run, and Henry gave chase. “You should have married me!” he screamed as he ran, “I would have loved you!”
Damien sprang to his feet and ran after them, but then he caught sight of something, no someone, in one of the cells. Natalie! The cell was like the others—a mouth instead of bars—but this one was quiet. Its teeth were crooked and yellow, stained with blood, and cracked like old bones. But Natalie was on the other side of those teeth, bound and gagged and… crying.
But she was awake and alert.
The alarm on her face was evident, as was the relief at seeing Damien through the gap in the vertical mouth. Damien approached, taking one step after the other. The mouths along the corridor were gnashing and clacking, but this one was still. Careful, he reached for the gap with his hand, but the mouth clamped down hard and he only just managed to save his arm from being cut off by yanking it back so hard the movement hurt his shoulder.
“I’m going to get you out of there,” he said.
But the rumbling outside was getting louder, Lily had disappeared—as had Henry—and these teeth weren’t going to make things easy.
He searched around him for something that might help; an iron bar, a fire extinguisher… an ax. But the dream prison seemed as inmate-proof as the real Alcatraz may have been. Natalie was whimpering now. She could see the alarm on his face. The concern. The helplessness. Had she not been afflicted with whatever curse Henry had lain on her she may have been able to use some of her own Magick to get out, but maybe throwing her scent around had been about as much as she could manage.
Then the Amber started to go warm in his hand, reminding him of its presence maybe. He opened his palm and watched the fire flickering golden and orange inside the little gem. It might have looked like a piece of the sun trapped inside a stone. Then a thought struck him. Damien took a step back, trapped the Amber between his thumb and forefinger, and wound back his arm.
He had never been a good pitcher, but he couldn’t exactly miss here.
Chapter Ten
Wherever that thing pretending to be Henry was, it’s dead now.
Damien didn’t know how he had come by this information, but it came to him all the same in the split second it took for the stone to fly from his hand toward the cell. Just as he had suspected, the mouth clamped down hard as soon as the gem crossed the threshold and shattered it, releasing the trapped explosion within. Only there had been no explosion.
Instead of the heat he expected there was cool. Instead of the suck and pop of a blast, there was quiet. Instead of being hurled across the room from the shockwave he was standing perfectly still. He had raised his hands to protect himself from the light and the blast, but he lowered them now and found himself standing on a long, empty, windy pier.
And Natalie was at the end of it.
“Natalie,” he said, running toward her. She turned around and smiled and he took her in an embrace, burying his nose in the cinnamon and honey smell of her hair. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said, “I chose to save your ass, didn’t I?”
He smiled at that. “Yeah, you could have let me take it.”
“No,” she said, “I couldn’t have.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” he said, pulling back and brushing the side of her face with his hand. “I’m here now and so are you. You’re safe.”
She nodded, but there was something about her eyes… they looked dull and muted. They didn’t have the same shiny brilliance that, despite being deep brown pools, he had seen them have before. Damien’s smile started to fade as if it had been washed away by the evening tide.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Damien… we…” she was struggling to find the words. “I can’t leave.”
He searched her eyes for an answer for a question his lips couldn’t ask but found none. “You have to leave. You have to wake up, Natalie.”
“I can’t,” she said. She turned her head and gazed across the bay. There, right where Damien had left it, was the roiling, churning black cloud—the Dark Fire. Arcs of green lightning were shooting across the sky and slamming into buildings and water, setting them ablaze with green fire. He could hear the roar of the flames even from here. And it seemed, somehow, th
at the storm was starting to move again.
To move toward the pier Damien was standing on.
“No,” he said, “That can’t be right. You have to wake up, Natalie. You have—” The shooting pain in his temple came back with a vengeance. It felt like he had been stabbed with an ice pick. He grimaced and fell back a few paces, and despite the pain he was in Natalie didn’t show any concern on her face. Maybe she couldn’t show any concern.
“She’s right,” said a voice from behind. Lily. Hers was also cold and unconcerned.
Damien spun around, holding the side of his head. “She has to wake up,” he said, “We freed her, didn’t we?”
Lily shook her head. “We freed her from Henry, but we were too late to stop the Dark Fire. It has already taken too much. She’ll be gone soon, Damien.”
“Gone?” He whipped around again and looked at Natalie. “She’s right there! How can you tell me she’s gone?”
“When the Dark Fire comes it’ll take what’s left of her. We should destroy her now before… she changes.”
“No,” he said, striding toward Natalie again. “I won’t let it take her—you—I won’t let it take you. Not after we’ve come this far.” Natalie looked up at him doe-eyed and blinking slowly. Maybe this was a trick, another test. “I’ll bind myself to her.”
“Damien,” Lily said, all the urgency suddenly returned to her voice. “You can’t do that. The Dark Fire will take you both!”
“If I can bind myself to her, I can give her enough of me that she’ll wake up… and all of this will be over.”
The incoming storm rumbled and roared as it approached. The water was starting to churn, frothing and lapping harder against the pier, wind picking up and blowing harder than it had been a moment ago. He didn’t know if they had seconds or minutes left, but he wasn’t about to stick around to find out.
Lily placed her hand on Damien’s shoulder. “Do you know what you’re saying?”
“That I’ll be bound to her forever in mind, body, and soul,” he said, not once taking his eyes away from Natalie’s. “I owe her, Lily. She saved my life, now I have to save hers.”
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