The Greatshadow spoke. ‘The Council will conclude after a last action. Natalia Torres is to be censored and taken into the Council’s custody. She will be held in our prison for dereliction of her duty as watcher for the armiger, until such time as the armiger completes his task and the city is once again safe enough for the Council to hold her trial. The Shadow Council accepts her partial liability in the armiger’s failure. She will be judged accordingly.’
Cruickshank’s mob exploded. The sound of a zoo at feeding time. He knew one thing about the Council’s prison – it deadened everything magical. It would sever Natalia’s protection from him.
Nessie shuffled forward, gripping the Grandmaster’s gauntlets. ‘No, Grandmaster, Greatshadow, please! There must a reason Natalia has neglected her duty, please!’
Blood pumped, filling Cole’s ears. All noise became garbled. The whisky flask ran dry. It waited in promise. This was a death sentence. His internal wiring sprung loose, and every defamation he’d ever suffered washed painfully over his exposed nerves.
Every muscle twitched in anticipation of the tension and release of combat, hate singing in his blood. The noise around him faded to tinnitus. It danced as he stood, a handbreadth from drowning the chamber in blood.
If he blew up, they’d kill him, and the Council would execute Nessie. To say nothing of what would happen to Natalia. They’d kill her too. Cole could see her in memory, laughing in that delighted way she did when he said what others wouldn’t say. The smouldering tension of their teens. The wash of hurt, jealous pain, when he knew they could never be.
For her sake, and for Nessie, he had to get out. Away from people. Nothing was safe anymore. He stumbled to his feet, lurching for the door. His exposed wiring threatened to spark an explosion. It banged against his gut armour. Armour that was soon to be lifted. Henry Millar had better be ready to step up when that happened.
Chapter 16
Rain washed over Natalia’s rag-doll form. She was collapsed on the hard concrete of a street. A real, ordinary street.
Mixcoatl had feasted on her consciousness, leaving her drunk and swimming in the vastness of her own mind, a shadowy pinprick of identity. As time wove new strands of experience, her identity swelled and began filing her again.
Footsteps passed by in a hurry. She was huddled in a tenement doorway down an alley. The doorway offered little protection from the elements, but the cold and rain felt as though it was happening to someone else, far away. Inside the husk of her body, her mind could feel deep sadness. She was trapped by grief.
The ache in her heart was worse than the disabling weariness crippling her limbs. The sky – full of the indolent light of streetlights – cried at her. The moments of loss ticked on.
Millie had deserved better. She’d been failed by everyone and had paid for the ambitions of those around her. Natalia was just the last in that line, exacting the highest price. It had been idiotic to agree to the break-out. Natalia had only herself to blame for Millie’s death.
She should have stuck to the rules; it was what she was good at. Rules kept her strong; they kept her in the right. She had to be above reproach, above it all, like her father had been. She’d staked her reputation on the gambit with the wytches and shamed herself. But why did it feel like she’d shamed her parents too? She pushed her torso up from the ground.
Her body juddered, heaving in sobbing breaths. The city air was fresh and sharp and more than she deserved. Nessie and the Council. They would be furious. What was worse, they’d be right by any measure. She couldn’t hide behind her burning need for justice now – she was indefensible. She leaned her shoulder against the door frame.
The Machiavellian players who called themselves her peers would be happy to see the Commander’s favourite caught doing something so monumentally messed up. She cried, trying to get her legs to work. She had fucked up on a treasonous scale, and the Council could cut her off from her magic for it. Censorship, it was called. She would rather a death sentence.
Natalia’s teeth gnashed at the taste of her own self-pity. The madness of the Mother had to be stopped. The Anvil couldn’t corrupt the women now, thanks to Natalia. It meant she might be able to save some of the wytches. A third of the mages on the whole planet, in a hidden pocket of the Ways, powering up the Mournanvil daily.
She had to get to the Coalition. She could blow it all wide open. Natalia itched to unload her burden in confession. Fitting punishment was the only acceptable metric to restore her now. She knew that, of everyone who would hear about her mistakes, Ethan would be the one who got it. She missed him with a keen, sharp longing. He was probably looking for her.
He hadn’t fallen; the plates of her protection wrapped him. She could feel them, intact and holding when she thought of him. Had he killed Andrew’s fledgling? She’d have to face that soon enough.
The street ahead of her was busy with passing people. There was enough solid and real at stake to not worry about what-ifs on top. Ethan Cole was the one soul in the city who could really look after himself, and she’d find a way to forgive him if he’d done something horrible. She wasn’t that much of a hypocrite.
They wouldn’t censor her, not while there was so much threat to the Council. The Grandmaster and Nessie were the only ones who knew about Natalia’s gift. The Greatshadow could never find out – the powerful old mages had been concrete on that point. How the Mother knew so much about her, was something she dearly needed to discover. The Mother had her own strange magic too, but these were questions for later.
She began pushing herself out of the doorway. The whisper of passing cars and the floating mishmash of conversation under the orange-lit sky settled around her bizarrely after the battle with the wytches. Life carried on as normal, as it should.
Her body felt as though it had been stretched and hammered out; her bones powdered by the crucible of war. Natalia, the hunter, was reduced to prey.
Somewhere in the Myriad, Mixcoatl whispered, urging her to join him in the eternal grasses, plains and forests of his realm, for the deadly dance of the hunt. So inviting, to forget it all and float away into the dwam. But she was Natalia Torres. Her parents had defeated the cult who tried to raise Huitzilopochtli. She was a child of legend and would not disappoint her family’s memory further.
Despite the pain, she was moving down the quiet alleyway. At the end of it, she saw the street sign. Lorne Street. Leith Walk pulsed to her right. The Council was all the way down in Holyrood, hidden in a pocket in the Scottish Parliament building. Valeria and her band would be able to cut her off from getting there, if she didn’t move fast.
She had so little left to give Mixcoatl, even for her eagle cantrip. She hung on to the pain of Millie’s death; some things were too hard-earned to give up. She would walk. The wytches would come out somewhere else in the city, she hoped.
She made her way into Lorne Street, away from the Walk, heading for Easter Road. They were so few, the mages left in the world. Edinburgh had twelve in total, including the Grandmaster and Nessie – tiny candles in a sea of black despair. For each one put out, the ocean of darkness crept further up the shoreline. The Mother had a huge proportion of the world’s remaining magic users, and she had led those women to ruin.
Natalia’s legs suddenly buckled, and she hit the ground, slammed by bone-bending force, winded as though by a hammer blow. Valeria must have found her. She had nothing left to fight with.
From behind her, back where her portal had brought her out, Valeria and the wytches emerged. Of all the luck. Millie had died to seal the portal, and the wytches had found her anyway. They would crush her. Millie’s sacrifice had been pointless.
A great rumbling hit the ground like an earthquake. The ground sizzled and suddenly flared with yellow-white light. She could just make out a form amidst the elemental magic boiling in a tower over her – she recognised it from textbooks as a Guardian. Her heart leapt. The Guardian would give even Valeria pause. She was safe!
The wy
tches hesitated. Images began to flood her mind in an overload of sensory information. Nessie in anti-magic bonds, pleading with the Grandmaster. The Council’s punishment of Cole. Cole, before the Council drunk and threatening. The Greatshadow’s voice, sending shivers down her spine as he announced censorship for her.
She tried to cry out, but her throat may as well have been cut. She reached out mentally, trying to convey her mind to the inferno that was the Guardian, but her thoughts were carried away in the endless flood of the Guardian’s own semi-sentient noise.
The power of Mixcoatl thrummed just out of reach, like a torrent of heavy water that she could hear but could not touch. The images from the Guardian came again. Escaping beast vampires, Cipactli in the city.
She recalled the Mother’s nonchalant declaration that nothing got out of the Pit while, to Natalia’s eyes, the Anvil extended its rope of power straight down. Straight into the Pit. Beast vampires were bursting into the city, clutching the Anvil’s extended hand. For every vampire the wytches unbound, the rope would be strengthened. They would keep coming.
Cole was expected to track, discover and destroy the Wytches of the Order of the Light? While they had the Mournanvil locked away with them? No one could live up to that task. The Anvil would trigger his fall in a second. The Council had set him on a path to ruin. And it was his fault. Drunk, swearing, threatening. He was a mess and behaving like an idiot.
Tears streamed down her cheeks as the Guardian opened a portal, no doubt to the Council prison. Cole would fall. After decades of surviving, all their work to keep him whole and alive would be ruined. If she’d just been there …
She cried for the wytches she had protected. They would be stripped bare before the Mournanvil, helpless beneath its torrent of corruption. She could have forgiven Ethan for the murder of a fledgling turned human. She didn’t know if she could ever forgive him for this.
Chapter 17
Cole staggered from the Council chambers, his brain shell-shocked and numb. Drizzle coated the last of the night. The Scottish Parliament building stood behind him like gallows. The careless eyes of late-night revellers passed him by. Envy fought with something darker as he watched them.
Beneath the numb disconnect an apocalypse stirred. Cole clung to his calm with a thread as thin as a wish. He had delivered the Cipactli, but it hadn’t been enough for them. Had they thought about what it might mean for their precious Council, to threaten the only good people in this shitty world?
He made for home, over Abbeyhill and down Easter Road which closed high around him, heading down a gentle slope flanked by tenement rows. One of the clapped-out shops was open. It sold little of use, but they stocked whisky. The cheap stuff, nasty and abrasive. Just right for the end of the world. The shopkeeper took one look at Cole and seemed to think better of arguing about Scottish licensing laws. Cole paid for a full crate.
He reached home, his door swinging open. He planned to stay there and hide for everyone’s sake. Maybe he could tie himself up in the basement or something. The stale smell of turning corpses brought nausea rolling up as he entered. It waited. Maybe he could puke It up?
Or cut It out? He looked to the weapons on the floor and decided to call that plan B. He grabbed a whisky bottle and cracked it open. The whisky burned his throat as he held it to his mouth. He retched, running for the sink and bringing the whole lot up.
It still swam inside him. Plan B then. The gate squeaked outside, and the buzzer went. Outside, Cole’s newly appointed watcher filled the peephole in a flop of hair. Good, maybe the kid could cut It out for him. Millar had given up his civilian status; he was a combatant now.
Cole opened the door. Henry Millar stood, wet and looking somewhere between sorry and annoyed. The touch of the kid’s anger had It squirm in Cole’s guts. He guzzled more whisky into his raw stomach.
‘You sure that’s a good idea, Cole?’ The metal cheap taste of blend whisky was exfoliating. Millar came in and stopped, covering his mouth with his hand. ‘Oh God, that smell …’ Cole closed the door.
Would there be any warning when Natalia’s protection left him? They might have moments. He stepped over the dead body, moved to the remains of the weapon rack still smashed on the training mats, and took his gladius.
‘Here kid, you’ve got to cut the parasite out of me.’
Millar backed off. ‘What?’
The kid needed a crash course in reckless, lifesaving, DIY surgery. ‘Here, drink a bunch of this, Millar.’ Cole offered the whisky. The kid drank. ‘Keep going, don’t stop till you choke.’ Millar’s eyes bulged and he spluttered, retching. ‘Keep it down, pal.’
Millar recovered and shrank back against the front door. This wouldn’t do at all. ‘Time to grow a pair, Millar. Come on, take the sword and stick the pointy end in, right here.’ Cole banged his gut. ‘come on, there’s no time. If I could do it myself, I would.’
Cole advanced. There was barely a foot between them. Henry pulled the Council’s wand out of his pocket and gesticulated with it. ‘Stay back, Cole. Stop it.’
He looked at Henry. So scared and weak, shrivelled against the door. He could call this pimply kid a combatant all he liked, but Millar couldn’t stop him.
It was exploring, swimming out beyond Cole’s gut. Natalia’s armour must have dropped, she must have been censored already. Black dust fell in thick, snow-sized flakes from the ceiling. It was rising.
When It burst from Cole’s skin, Henry Millar would die, then everyone else would die after him. It simmered. Panic threatened to swallow him. Cole shoved Millar. Millar pointed the wand. ‘Well, go on then, use it! Do it!’ It swarmed, growing inside, black, greasy power swirling in the corners of his vision.
Millar blanched. ‘I can’t use it – you’re still you! Just calm down!’
This was no good. Everyone would die, and it would be Millar’s fault. ‘Come on, you weak waste of space. Stop me! Now, or I’m going to hurt you, Millar.’
He came forward, closing the gap between them. Henry hit him in the head with the whisky bottle which bounced and fell on the floor. Cole snarled, pushing Millar into the door, the pain in his head flaring hot and angry.
‘Cole, I can feel that thing in you. It’s close, man – concentrate! Just calm down!’
Millar kicked and punched, feeble and panicked, face blanched, the wand clattering on the floor.
There was no time for lessons. Millar kept pushing Cole feebly. He thumped Millar against the door, trying to jolt him into action, fear swelling in a tide.
‘That won’t do it; you’ve got to stop me.’ It sang in his blood, coils and ropes of corrupt power leaking up from the floor in tendrils. Was this what other siphons saw? Was this how the world looked without the protection of Natalia’s gift? The ground and air swam with Murk power.
‘Calm down, Cole. Please, stop it. I need you. Please, Cole, help me!’ The kid cried in helpless sobs.
His sister cried, screaming for his help.
He backed off, the memory ringing in his ears. The sting of his shame at his failure threatened to blow him up. But Millar was like her, in a way. Older, but just as helpless. He clung to the thought, trying to force his exposed wires back inside where they wouldn’t spark so dangerously. The kid needed protecting; he could do that. He paced.
Moments passed, adrenaline running like metal in his veins. Fuck the Council. He couldn’t do this. It grew. Nat and Nessie, they’d lose everything. It growled with each thump of his heart.
‘Cole, please. Come on, man. Stop this. I need you; your friends, Nessie and Natalia, they need you. You can’t give up on them – you have to fight’
He hid underground with shameful relief.
Cole shook his head, fighting the tears gathering in his eyes. That was who he was. He had left his sister to die, and he had felt relieved about it. His fist smashed into the wall, gouging a chunk out. That was who Ethan Cole was. And worse, there was still further for him to fall. There was always further. He hit the wal
l again, dust billowing as plasterboard and brick powdered. If he failed now, like he had always failed, he would become like his cannibal father.
He roared, fists pounding the wall, smashing it to pieces. It rejoiced.
‘Please, Cole, you’re better than this!’
Millar’s shout cut through. His chest heaved. Destruction felt good, it always had. His fists were ragged, bloodied, bruised and numb. It shrank as Cole remembered his father’s face, eyes the same shape and colour as the father who he’d always known, but everything else lost to the monster he had become. He’d known, even at that age, that it was the mirror for his future.
Henry stood before him. Scared, lost, small. The kid needed him. They all needed him. Ice flooded his guts. No more – he couldn’t become his father. He had to be something else. The fight left him. The coils of power that had risen from the floor fell away, and he sagged against the wall.
He couldn’t abandon Natalia and Nessie. He couldn’t hurt Millar, another innocent trapped in the world of shit. But he couldn’t hold It alone, either. ‘Millar, take the sword, cut It out of me, please.’ The remains of the wall supported Cole’s weight as he sat.
Millar fixed his collar which was scrunched and pulled out of shape. ‘Does it even work like that, man? Is your demon-thing actually in there?’
According to Nessie, the parasite wasn’t physically inside him. But Cole could feel It as a real thing, and he’d hoped that, just maybe, Nessie and the Council were wrong. No one knew much about his magic or how it worked.
‘What choice do we have, Henry?’ The kid cracked another bottle of whisky, took a huge swig and offered it to Cole, drying his face. It felt wretched, pushing Henry around like he had. ‘I’m sorry, Henry. It’s just – the Council took away your civilian status. They gave you the job of safeguarding the city from me, and if you can’t do it …’
The Cost of Magic (The Ethan Cole Series Book 1) Page 20