Digital Magic (The Chronicles of Art Book 2)

by Philippa Ballantine

  Sally’s cries had stilled to dry racking sobs, but Aroha could feel her own body starting to convulse with repressed horror.

  Nana was stroking her head. “I am not so easily fooled as that poor boy, Seed. Nothing you can say will make me give her up.”

  The creatures gathered in a tight knot, stamping their feet on the earth, eager. “You are far from your home, lady Fey.”

  “And you, yours.”

  They hissed at her reply. “The difference is,” came the chilling retort, “we are many, you are but one.”

  Aroha felt her grandmother flinch at that, but she did not speak again. Holding the girls close, she turned and guided them away from the house and the scene of desolation. Looking up, Aroha could see by the light of the moon that she was crying. Her tears were silver. She didn’t look Fey and powerful now—she looked bowed and shaken.

  Sally had retreated into shock and would not catch Aroha’s eye. She had witnessed her family’s death: an instant of profound horror that had quite possibly destroyed her. For a human there could be no healing from such a moment. Aroha was already grieving for that part of her lost friend. For both of them there would be no more carefree days. The world was wrecked.

  If only she could have done something, Aroha railed at herself. The taniwha had given her power beyond her grandmother’s, but she had not found the way to wield it and now the whole village was destroyed. And Daniel, the friend she’d risked everything to save, was dead.

  “Don’t blame yourself, child,” Nana’s voice was faint and strained. “The Unmaker knows all the ways to tempt, and Daniel will not be the last to give in.” She caught Aroha, pushed her on ahead when it seemed she might try to look back. “Don’t do that either, dear heart. They are following, and I do not know how far my power will take us.”

  Sally broke, crying for her mother again and again into Nana’s side and shivering like a beaten animal.

  “Where are we going, Nana?” Aroha asked timidly, afraid of the answer.

  “To the sea, love. The land has no place for us here, and we shall only bring destruction if we stay.”

  The three of them, wrapped in sorrow and misery, followed the half-formed road towards the rocky beach, but always behind them came the stealthy footsteps of the killers. When the girls stumbled and Nana stopped to help them, the Seeds paused too, still too afraid of her light to dare an attack. Each time they seemed a little closer. Aroha squeezed her eyes shut and let herself be led.

  If only she had power to change time. Perhaps if she imagined well enough, they could go back to podding peas on the sunporch. Sally and her brothers could be banging on the flyscreen door.

  The stones twisted under their feet while the wind howled. Everything reminded them that this was real. The village was no more, and she was responsible.

  They could hear the sea, though, the pounding of the grey waves on the rocks, the indrawn hiss of water running over the gravel. Nana faltered and Aroha’s heart jumped.

  “I don’t…” her grandmother’s hand tightened on her shoulder, “I don’t have the strength, girls.”

  The sound of talons piercing the earth came from behind them. Their pursuers were eager to finish their work.

  “Yes you do!” Aroha tugged at her sleeve, pulled at Sally, bending her determination to getting them all out of this. Sally hung like sodden washing between them, her voice and will gone.

  “No,” Nan’s expression was drawn apart, her face smooth, like she’d already dropped her worldly cares. “They will catch us before we reach the sea. I have had my time, dear. Now it is yours.”

  Aroha screamed in frustration and anger. The hills echoed with her wild despair.

  “No!” It felt like her insides were erupting and she would be turned inside out with grief. It was too much, too cruel. She was a wild animal thrashing against injustice.

  Nana would not let her throw herself on the ground and have a tantrum. Instead she was already disentangling herself from the girls.

  She grabbed the vial from inside Aroha’s cardigan and before either girl could cry out, she had smashed the fragile glass. The shivering friends were engulfed in twinkling dust that smelt of roses and grass. Nana’s silver light flared up again, burning white phosphorous against the night sky, a jet of flame that would burn out all too soon. She spoke a word, a summoning; a call from the past that spat like lightning into the air and demanded this last thing from the realm of humanity.

  The bird came. A massive eagle, a creature from New Zealand's past, its wings thrumming with power as it dived down. The creature’s shadow, its great hooked beak and powerful taloned feet, were outlined against the moon.

  Its arrival was the coming of the taniwha or the moa. It had been the enemy of man when it lived, but it knew the Fey and flew out of legend for one of them now. There was not much reality to it, mostly memory held together by Fey Art, a sketch of greatness. Nearly ten feet of wing carried the eagle down in a swoop. The sound was the wail of a banshee.

  Aroha knew its purpose, knew why Nana had summoned the eagle, but she cried out all the same. Too late. The two girls were caught up in the eagle’s embrace, its ghostly shape bearing them aloft, even while Aroha's hands stretched back to where Nana stood in a puddle of her own dimming light. Aroha felt herself dying with Nana, trying to hold onto those precious memories, but outraged that memory would soon be all that was left of her.

  Distance softened the outline of the woman who turned back towards her attackers. In her step there was weariness but acceptance, like she was only glad to have held out that long against them. Then they seemed to blur together until her light was lost in a sudden surge of black.

  The moment of her death, though not seen, felt like a steel spike driven through her granddaughter. Aroha spasmed and reached in the eagle's grasp while Sally hung like a rag doll of misery. The grip of grief was even stronger than that of the eagle’s talons with claws of its own that buried into Aroha and left her weeping and feeling dead inside. Perhaps if she wept enough she could change things. Surely the gods would not be unmoved by her despair.

  Nothing changed. The light was still gone, and her Nana with it. The eagle still soared on the night sky, still obeying Nana's command but not for much longer. The one who had called it out of myth had died. Memory alone could not hold the bird aloft for long.

  Aroha heard the whine of Art unraveling even as the air rushed around them. She knew with a dull certainty that this, her Nan’s last effort, had only a few moments left before it would begin to fade. The eagle was not meant to be, and reality demanded that it return to the realm of legends.

  The tears ran cold down her cheeks. She reached out and took Sally’s limp hand across the gap. Grief and guilt battled in equal measures. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered to her friend. Soon both of them would join Nan beyond the bright sea of death. Her magic had brought them to this point, but she knew nothing about how to use it or save them now.

  Sally’s head came up and her eyes gleamed with moonlight, but she said nothing.

  The friends held hands tightly, even when the eagle finally surrendered to reality with an angry cry. Somehow in the lonely abrupt descent through the air, they managed to cling to each other.

  When the sea caught them below, at least it took them together. The last tumbling glimpse Aroha had of her homeland was through a mask of tears.

  18

  Homecoming

  Ella’s hand was warm in his. Ronan looked down at it, surprised by how really good it felt. He’d never truly appreciated such a small gesture before.

  The way her curves slotted against his side so easily, the soft brush of her breath on his neck, all were pleasant distractions from their destination. They were heading once more for the sprawl of London and he knew he should have been afraid, or cautious, or at least planning his assault on this fortress from Ella’s past. Yet Ronan could not find a moment for any of these things.

  He rolled the feeling around in the ba
ck of his head like a tasty but unidentified morsel. That was it: he was contented, happy for the first time since his powers had begun to fade. No other woman had felt so right to him. He wanted to keep her hand in his and know what was going on in her head.

  He’d sampled many mortal women in his years in this realm, both before and after the Fey had slipped away. Yet fragmentary memories remained with him; a look in an eye, the sound of joyous laughter, but none had felt like this. Only one other had come close. He had not yet been Ronan then, but a dark perfect face with eyes as warm and loving as the African sun. He’d lain with a Nubian princess in the splendor of Abel Simbel. She’d been a flash of lightning in his old life, something as beautiful and incomprehensible as humanity could ever be. Puck had enjoyed his time with her; she had been the jewel of her age.

  The Fey who had been Puck frowned and sat a little straighter in his chair. He recalled something familiar about that face now. In a moment of sudden clarity he saw her reflected in Bakari’s features. More, he recognized something of himself. His Fey blood, which had begun stirring since he'd found Ella, told him without question that Bakari was his descendant. It was not unusual. Most Fey had gifted the human realm with their own wild seed, but as far as he had known, there had been none of his.

  Until now. He frowned and looked across at Ella.

  She was staring out of the window, trailing a finger down the length of the glass as she watched the last of the countryside whip past. Her mahogany curls had flopped over her eyes and she looked so young it made his chest tight.

  Ronan wondered if he should tell her his revelation, but decided against it for now. Bakari should be the first to know. It might not even matter. After nearly two thousand years, Ronan was fairly sure he wasn’t needed to be any sort of father figure. Yet, he felt a small measure of pride: some part of him had survived and grown in this world.

  “What are you smiling about?” Ella tugged his hand.

  “Nothing.” Another smile would not be repressed.

  “Stop it,” but Ella’s voice was warm somehow. “Doesn’t the idea of breaking into a high-security covertly-run hospital fill you with dread?”

  Ronan thought for a moment. “No... not really.” It was true. A distant logical part of his brain wondered why that was. It was as if he’d been transported to that moment when he’d first stepped into the human realm, before everything had jaded him.

  “I’ve seen a lot of bad things. What can a hospital possibly offer?” He knew he wasn’t telling her the truth, but she’d probably be very scared if she knew exactly how much he felt for her.

  “It’s more than that,” Ella paused, leaning her head back on the battered seat. “There’s a taste in the air, a cloud of fear. I can’t remember much about the place, but that I do recall.”

  “Why do you think you were there? Were you sick?”

  She shook her head, eyes squeezed tightly shut, and between them the image flashed: a distorted view of the world seen through a shroud of crinkly plastic, lights blue-green and harsh, and the air which seemed to stop sound dead. And there was cold: deep, bone aching coldness.

  “No…” A tear escaped the corner of her eye. “I wasn’t sick, I don’t think. I felt more… like an experiment. Like I was a frog tied to the school bench just waiting for the kid with the knife to arrive.”

  Ronan could feel her heart racing, and for once he couldn’t think of the perfect words. It didn’t matter how ancient he was, sometimes even the Trickster was stumped. He slipped his arm behind her and hugged her tight. In between them, the hardness of his rifle reminded them of the seriousness of the situation.

  The VFT roared through the outer slums and they watched it quietly, cherishing each second. They disembarked at Victoria Station and slipped through the crowd, still silent.

  Their hands found each other, as they picked a battered old mini van out of the stand outside the station and Ella told them where to go. She knew the address.

  Getting out of the cab a few streets away from the facility, they stepped into a world of abandoned warehouses and peeling shops. Ronan peered into one. It seemed full of dusty remains of some ancient containers like it had taken fifty years to get from China. Immediately he began to wonder, to feel the unreality of the place. He could see no customers for this strange array of shops, and he shot Ella a piercing look.

  She shrugged. “They’re a front for the facility. They don’t like to have visitors.”

  He could feel it now, the curious looks at the back of his neck.

  “So just look like we’re lost.” She tugged him around the corner, hand raised as if looking for another cab. She led him down a maze of corridors and the sense of unreality grew. Somehow the senses he’d just recently reacquired were blurring on him already. Ronan tried to remember the feeling, but he’d been too long gone from his own magic.

  Ella interrupted his train of thought. “You know,” she said peering past his shoulder, “I could have done this much better by myself: I only have one shiver cloak, you know.”

  “I’m not going to let you out of my sight.”

  “Just what I wanted you to say,” she kissed him briefly before turning back to the dripping wall. Her fingers danced along it, tapping out a rhythm not familiar to Ronan. The illusion wavered and then disappeared, resolving into a plain metal door. Ella grinned, expecting him to be surprised. “Never seen anything like it, right.”

  “Well actually,” it was very like Greer’s, but he tucked that observation away. Mentioning the blind witch seemed to always summon her.

  Ella was obviously distracted by this journey back into her past, for her hands were running over the steel of the door. Quickly enough, she found the retina activated lock. “The back door, where they dump all their rejects and leftovers.”

  Ronan ran a professional eye over it. “Looks like it’ll need more than a crowbar to get in. Maybe we should have brought Bakari.”

  A strange expression ran across her face, and he could have sworn the scent of jasmine tickled his nostrils. “This is… well, pretty personal, and besides,” her muscles bunched under his fingers, “I don’t think we’ll need him.”

  Then she did it, curved her hand around the lock, and changed everything for Ronan. Blue lightning danced from her fingertips, and power that he had not seen since before he’d chosen this form suddenly reappeared in the human realm.

  She was looking at him, and he couldn’t read her expression. It was blank and perfect, reminiscent of another Fey he’d loved and just as powerful as she had been. Ronan felt the trickle of something that felt very much like fear. He might love Ella, but he knew only as much as she did about her background. His ancient and powerful cousin had been born to such power, and he was suddenly afraid what it might do to Ella. Could she control such Art?

  Ronan held her gaze, remembering that right now she had more of the Art than he did. The thought made him flinch. Yet she smiled easily at him, and Ronan knew he didn’t have to worry about what he would have done if she spun away towards the unseelie side of Art. Then she blinked, and the inscrutable goddess was gone. Only a fearful woman remained.

  Ronan shook his head, trying to block out her thoughts and clear his own. It had been a very long time since he’d heard another’s inner voice. While he welcomed the closeness, he needed all his concentration right now.

  He said nothing about the lightning and didn’t give Ella a chance to break down and cry. Whatever lay beyond the steel of the door, it was at least the truth.

  “Let’s go in,” Ella murmured and levered open the entrance.

  Inside was silent and still, a long corridor leading in and down. Their footsteps did not echo. In here, all sound was dead. Ronan tried unsuccessfully to spot any cameras.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” he whispered. The corridor swallowed the words until he wished that he had not let them out at all. An even stranger feeling swirled inside him. It tickled his fingers and fluttered behind his eyelids. It was not
unpleasant, but he couldn’t identify it.

  At his side, Ella matched him stride for stride. He could hear her thoughts if he strained his ears, but he didn’t want to; her distress was already hammering in the back of his head.

  When she’d last seen this corridor, she'd been running down it, naked under a battered long coat, and it had been Doyle at her side. Behind had been pain, and now here they were, walking calmly back towards it.

  Greer was watching their progress. The two figures were beamed straight into her mind from the tiny silver thread which connected her to the Line. It was easy to live in two worlds if you practiced long enough, and Greer had been blessed with longer than most. It also meant that the loss of her eyes was not too onerous.

  She’d somehow expected Ronan, but to see the usually quiet and unassuming Ella walking that particular corridor was a shock. Her brow furrowed and the vines of the conservatory whipped back and forth to the unseen winds of her displeasure. How foolish she’d been. Ella was Nill, and all the time she’d been right where she’d never expected—Penherem.

  Steadying her breathing, Greer tried to calm herself. It was alright: in fact it was better than alright. The location was not her choice, but she had Ronan and Ella in the palm of her hand. With a short bitter smile, her hands danced across the narrow span of her gear. When the moment came, she would be ready.

  Ella felt like her heart was rising up, trying to escape out of her throat. Vision flickered and blurred like she was in some badly played out corner of the Line. Yet this was real—she had to keep reminding herself that. Memories were close. She could feel them fluttering near her head like little moths, and she couldn’t decide if she should crush them or invite them in.

  Ronan matched her step for step, but he let her be in front, just a little, as if to let her work things out for herself. For all the emotions he could see of hers, she could feel parts of him as well. Something was stirring inside the Fey that had once been Puck: he might not even have been aware of it. He tasted like honey in her head: ripe with barely concealed power.