The Cost of Magic (The Ethan Cole Series Book 1)

by Andrew Macmillan

  His lungs felt filled with gravel and bubbles. He plunged his gauntlet down, tearing through the vampire’s chest cavity. It sprung open, revealing its soul. The vampire’s claws flailed, one coming in which he narrowly parried, severing it at the wrist.

  His arms were concrete, his vision black-edged while light spots played in front of his eyes. The screaming wail of the raw vampire passed close overhead. It fed with gluttony on his life energy, all the while howling to be released.

  The Pit boomed. A speaking chorus harmonised with the god’s dirge. Knights, cut down by the vampires, shambled to their feet, filled with an aura of off-white magic. The song of the vampire-god woke the dead. Wells dropped to his knees, covering his ears.

  The vampire-ghost spun in the air, heading straight for Cole and the beast vampire’s exposed soul. It plummeted toward the exposed chest of the beast vampire. Cole struck the ghost as it passed right over him, his gauntlet stabbing into its core.

  It weighed a sun. He couldn’t move. He reached out as the beast vampire’s corpse vanished and he fell the few feet to the ground, just over a metre or so from the Anvil, pinned by the ghost’s great weight. He stretched – the Anvil was a hand span away – but he couldn’t drag the mass of the ghost to it. His chest throbbed; his arms were numb. More beast vampires blurred in from the Pit to tear him apart.

  Then, the Grandmaster was among the failing men, great sword swinging, alone on the field. He sliced straight through the first oncoming vampire and exploded the second with a sheet of lightning. He reached Cole, looking down. ‘I need to reach the Anvil; I can’t reach it!’

  The Grandmaster inhaled invisible power in a doomed attempt to move either the Anvil or Cole. Cole shouted, ‘Myriad magic doesn’t work!’ The rope leading from the Anvil blazed.

  A hand, the span of an aeroplane, reached out from the Pit mouth and crumbled the earth around it. The vampire-god tasted the free air. Reality cracked under the stress as a weight unlike any the world was built for pulled everything toward it.

  Mist spewed from the Pit, rank with the smell of death. Pressure viced around Cole’s skull. One of the knights’ heads pulped, his skull imploding. Time froze in a halo of agony.

  Emotion, thought and bodies were pulled toward the gravity of the emerging god, who pulled cloud from the sky as he drew breath to roar. The psychic shockwave of the god’s aura detonated, and pain, crushing weight and exhaustion blacked Cole out.

  His parasite thrashed and kicked, pulling him back to consciousness. He lay on the ground; seconds had passed. Blood coated his entire body, pouring from his skin in droplets like sweat. The world paused on the brink of tearing apart. Trees in the park were laid flat, the hill of Arthur’s Seat slid in an avalanche of partial collapse, the Pit mouth at the epicentre of the blast.

  The ground he lay on shifted and crumbled like wrinkled skin as it was pulled toward the god in a landslide. The Anvil inched closer to Cole. The Anvil’s surface roared. A tiny sliver of dull green lifeforce still fed Cole. The ghost vampire was still skewered on his gauntlet. The ground crumbled again, the Anvil sliding toward his waiting, outstretched hand. His bones creaked and twisted, his heart lurched painfully, the weight on his chest crushing.

  It panicked, feeling life leave its host, but It could only thrash and wail while Cole focused his last thoughts on holding It caged, to wither and die inside his body. The ground broke apart; the Anvil creaked and slid, closer, closer. He strained as the ground shook, the Anvil’s surface reaching his fingertips. He stabbed and twisted with his gauntlet, a tiny white ball blooming above the Pit mouth. He’d never hoped his immovable object might be Its immovable object too.

  He fed the last shred of green energy from the strand of his life force, his heart thrashing painfully for a moment before it stopped.

  The universe blinked.

  *

  Natalia’s spear vanished as it plunged towards the Mother’s throat. Overbalanced, she fell. The world dimmed, her ears ringing, pain wracking her arms, her hands numb.

  She tried to stand, but the weight of her limbs held her tight on the floor. Her brain and body had been severed. Connections that had been so full of pain a moment ago now called out into emptiness.

  The Mother stood over her and wept. ‘I told you not to make them choose.’

  Natalia tried to speak, but her tongue lolled. Whatever magic had done this, it wasn’t something familiar.

  ‘Such a waste of potential, Natalia. And worse, now I’ve found you after all the years of thinking you had died, you throw your power away for poorly understood vengeance.’

  She tried to get control of her rubbery limbs. What did the Mother mean by find her after all the years thinking she was dead?

  ‘I’m curious, what did the old man – your Commander – tell you about me?’

  What was she on about?

  The Mother knelt. ‘He separated us, all those years ago. You got your power from our father. I took mine from our mother.’

  Natalia wanted to scream, shout, deny, argue, but all she could do was watch. Movement, touch and control were foreign concepts to her scrambled mind. She had no sister. This had to be lies, another manipulation.

  ‘It’s okay, sister, I’m here now, at the end. Perhaps I’ll let you die with whatever platitudes the old man gave you.’ This woman couldn’t be family. But the more Natalia looked, the more she saw. The photo she had of her parents was burned into her memory.

  The Mother had her father’s cheekbones, their mother’s eyes. The sense of familiarity in the Mother’s movements, her stance, her mannerisms … They were like Natalia’s own. Her eyes betrayed her, leaking tears of frustration.

  ‘Yes, sister. There is a whole world I wanted to show you.’

  She couldn’t be related to the Mother – or more accurately, the woman the Mother currently was.

  Natalia scoured the Mother’s face for some sign she was lying, that she was mad – delusional about this, as well as about the truth of the rising god. But there was nothing, except for the madness of cold rationality in the face of unspeakable waste and suffering that she had caused by her hubris.

  Cold air blasted above Natalia, carried on a plume of thunder. The Mother flew backward. Natalia wanted to cry out for Nessie to stop. Her brain rocked with questions, a perfect storm in her paralysed state. If this woman was her kin, who did that make her? What else didn’t she know?

  Nessie strode over her, his eyes dark, looking down with concern. The Mother tried to stand, her legs weak. Nessie invoked, pulling raw power into himself. The Mother threw up a warding hand, beginning her casting of her shield spell, but it was too late. A searing bolt of forked lightning struck her. Her body jerked and burned, and she fell, boneless and smouldering to the platform floor. Natalia watched, helpless, as her sister drew a last wheezing breath, and then was still. Nessie stood over the Mother and stooped to check her pulse. His face was cold. The man who had kept her safe her whole life had been lying to her all this time.

  Feeling returned in a trickle. Enough that she could flop over and watch the end. No one had caught her when she’d needed it, as she’d caught Cole through all the years. When she’d made one wrong choice, he’d made it a thousand times worse for her.

  Was he in on this secret too? Did Ethan and Nessie laugh at her naivety behind her back? As she flipped onto her side, the vampire-god’s hand emerged from the Pit. Everything froze. Time stuttered to a grinding halt. Ethan was on the ground, surrounded by rushing vampires.

  The shockwave of the god’s aura smashed into her; pain howled in her disconnected body. Ethan was there one moment, the Anvil inches from his arm. Then he – and the Anvil –vanished. With a bellow that stripped her nerves, the giant hand pulled at the land around the Pit mouth and vanished.

  Time spun back up like a chewed cassette tape. Beast vampires, frozen mid-gorge, were hauled bodily toward the collapsing ground as the earth buckled for a hundred metres in all directions around the wound that
had marked the Pit. Figures, shambling and broken-looking, flopped to the ground.

  Spite warred with grief and left nothing but ash. Ethan was gone, leaving her here with her world upside down. Where there had been a link with him, there was space. Her body regained control slowly, her limbs responding.

  The fortress was collapsing, a swarm of destruction seething all around, and yet the world seemed lifeless. The spark, the colour, had gone. The Myriad. Mixcoatl. Her god was gone. She reached for the power, forming her keys, shouting Nahuatl.

  Her body was picked up and carried as the world crumbled and broke apart, the fortress dying. Nothing mattered. Mixcoatl was gone; he couldn’t hear her anymore. The spark, nurtured and shielded by her lifetime of hard work and sacrifice, had died.

  Chapter 30

  Light wheeled above, a tiny dot. A tiny hole that spun like one of the portals. Funny to see it. That would make stars in the sky tiny portal holes, exiting him into the heavens. Space, breathless space. He’d be fine there; he didn’t need air now.

  Past moments flashed, wheeling with the night above, losing him in recall. His sister watched him and smiled. Finally, he could give her rest.

  ‘Naw ye dinny, shagger! Yer no dying on me, ye peely-wally loser!’ Pain, severe stabbing pain, curled him in a curve of limbs. His fingers raked his chest. His lungs coughed in the warm air. Stars and blank spots wheeled. His heart stuttered to life.

  ‘Look alive, ye waste o’ space! That life ye feel isny free.’ Adrenaline lurched his heart in painful sprints.

  Air rushed by, whistling. The imploding earth closed around him like a hand becoming a fist in slow motion. The roar in his ears was not the vacuum of space – he fell, down, into the Pit.

  Behind him, he could hear the Anvil’s dirge, feverish. The god fell too.

  ‘Dinny look down, ahm no dying wi’ you in here!’ His body was spent; how was he supposed to move?

  ‘Dae yer stabby jump thing, ye daft crofter!’

  He couldn’t, or It would take over. He couldn’t fight It any longer. It stirred, moving weakly.

  ‘Dinny worry yerself aboot that. I’ll give ye the peat tae burn, just get us oot! It’s either that or join this lot.’

  Bodies fell past them. Huge beast vampire bodies, each a mass of scar tissue from centuries of hunts, mauling each other to death, only to rise again.

  Shards of earth the size of city blocks plummeted and reformed as the Pit deepened, pouring down and down into the bowels of the earth. Furnace heat began to stir the air. He could feel the mass of the First, pulling the land back down around it, as the god fell like the morning star.

  When he saw the land of the Pit reform, it became obvious. The weight of the First held this place down, and the beast vampires locked down with him.

  ‘Like whit ye see, shagger?’

  No, he didn’t at all.

  ‘Right then, dae yer jabby thing, and lets git tae fuck!’

  Cole pulled the barest trickle of power into himself. It awakened like a drug addict stabbed in the heart with adrenaline. The air was thick with power, but he dared not draw from it. Instead, he fed It direct from the green stream of Brude’s life force that swelled his own life energy thread. It coiled and struck the walls of his mind-prison; he didn’t know how long he could hold It out.

  The metres vanished, the opening of the Pit mouth overhead was a pinprick, far away. It fed on the siphoned life force of the old king, Its aggression flaring like a magnesium fire in his belly. Gauntlets of whispering shadow extended from his hands. The cracks in reality shone like gemstone seams, alarmingly wide so close to the pull of the First. Without the fractures in reality he couldn’t make a portal. He would be trapped in the Pit forever. He still might be.

  He punched out, the tiny portal spinning on the end of his gauntlet. He focused as far up as he could. A rain of ragged shapes plummeted from far above. He punched with his left gauntlet, feeling, if not seeing, the white hole emerge. The universe blinked.

  They came out beneath a great chunk of soil and stone.

  ‘Jump, ye bell-end!’

  He punched, the portal entrance spinning, but he couldn’t see above them. He punched his left hand as the land came on, cutting an exit. Blink.

  The danger of blind jumping announced itself when a shower of fist-sized boulders rained down a split second later.

  ‘Dinny dae that again, ye numpty!’ If they survived this, he and the old king would be having words.

  A pair of bright violet eyes flashed down with the rain of rock, huge scythe-like claws sweeping in to rake him. He double-jabbed. Blink.

  ‘Ye’ve got tae climb faster.’ Brude’s voice was far away, weak and fading. He punched again, aiming as high as he could see. Blink.

  The downdraught was accelerating, pulling them like the dregs of water down a plug hole.

  ‘It’s nae use – we canny break free!’ He stretched as far as he could.

  Punch, blink – he stood on a lump of glassy, fused rock around fifty metres across. Heat had fused it into a dark mess. Air whistled like a kettle along its sharp edges. He punched out; they blinked.

  And emerged into a swarm of falling beast vampires, limbs thrashing at each other as they snarled, plummeting. And there, above, was the rapidly shrinking exit, sealing forever. Once it shut, there would be no getting out, not now the Anvil was in here too.

  ‘Push, laddie.’ Brude’s voice was a whisper. Blink.

  The earth – the regular earth – tumbled down in a sheet, closing out the world above. The gap shut, slamming the Pit into final night.

  It clicked, waiting. He punched once, opening the black hole.

  ‘Ah got nothing left, shagger, reach fir the stars!’ The faintest trail of the old king remained. Never mind that his last words were a quote from a pop band. The unseen stars wheeled above the Pit mouth, and Cole aimed for them. He punched his left hand. The universe blinked.

  Air, fresh lungfuls of sweet, cool air, scented with iron and slaughter and soil, filled him. The smell blocked out everything for a moment. He could sense the trickle of Brude’s consciousness leaving; the king running out of him like a tear, evaporating on the wind.

  He had no idea what he was doing, but he reached out with Its senses overlapped on his own. There wasn’t a decent heartbeat for over a hundred metres, but a tiny, thready, nervous little system was hopping through the blood-soaked grass.

  He aimed the trickle that marked the old king’s life force at the twitchy system, his arm twisting like it did to open the portals. Brude’s energy left him, his knees collapsed.

  His eyes rolled while he lay on the soft, comfortable earth. Just a nap, that was all. Just five minutes. As his lids dropped, a rabbit’s face came up, nuzzling his.

  ‘Is this the best ye could dae, ye grave-hole?’ Exhaustion washed out every thought. A talking rabbit. What a weird dream.

  Chapter 31

  Nessie glanced up at the spectacle as he made his way up Easter Road and down Abbeyhill, heading for Holyrood Park. The magical equivalent of an aurora borealis filled the city sky, the Great Glamour expending unprecedented power to dampen the mundane population’s perception of the calamitous events at the Pit. The glamour was powerful, but the damage done would ripple across the city for months or years to come. They could risk no exposure of the truth. Measures would have to be taken. Nessie and the Grandmaster would need to nudge things along to keep the population wrapped in the safety of ignorance.

  People were the single most curious and ingenious species on the planet. Anyone who thought they were too lazy or too stupid to work out the truth for themselves didn’t understand humanity. It was why the creatures of the Murk and the Myriad hid. That people would not accept the truth lying down was why the Coalition hid it from the people. Humanity would one day be strong enough to stand up to the dark, but it was not there yet.

  For all their ingenuity, magic held powerful sway over people. It had shaped the ages, driven progress and galvani
sed civilisation; and now, with those things done? The cost of magic was too high. There had been wars before, and the world had not always recovered well.

  But as long as the Armistice remained intact, Nessie knew it wouldn’t be long before the latest celebrity gossip took front page again, and people got on with their lives. Cities rebuilt. People adapted. It was the strength mankind had, that the darkness lacked.

  Nessie reached the park perimeter and gasped. Up close, it was carnage. Most of the Coalition’s number were limp and dead, sprawled in the ruptured ground around Arthur’s Seat. Misty vapour, heady with the nauseating stench of death, clung to the battlefield. Tears fell as he passed bodies he couldn’t stop looking at, yet feared recognising.

  Ethan was alive, his rune marked him out as ahead, near the epicentre of the blast. Nessie hurried, as quickly as he dared, wishing Natalia was with him. His apprentice’s grief at the loss of her magic had been an abrasive thing to watch.

  But Ethan had done it, somehow. His skills would be vital for what was to come. The recovering city would be the perfect breeding ground for rogue siphons and other more insidious dangers.

  And there was already a siphon loose. Valeria had not been at the fortress. She would be running amok in the city, taking advantage of the chaos. She and the Mother had played their opening hand and nearly ended the world.

  Andrew Ancroft – now human – had escaped, along with Henry Millar and Cruickshank’s mob. Nessie would have executed Andrew, but the soldiers would not have believed the truth of his ex-vampiric nature, and there’d been no time for arguing.

  He picked his way through the battlefield. The rubble around the Pit mouth – now covered by a landslide from the hill above – made spotting Ethan difficult.

  There would be so few of them now to guard the city, so few to keep the balance in check, and they were rapidly becoming fewer. He could sense none of the Myriad spark in Natalia now. He had been forced to leave her in Lorne Street with Henry. The boy was taking her to Ethan’s flat. It seemed as good a place as any. She had been too shell-shocked to move quickly, rambling about leaving the Coalition and ‘going ordinary’. She’d been edgy and accusatory with him, asking him questions he would need to worry about later.