by Jasmine Walt
“Oh, Com.” Abandoning my half-eaten breakfast, I rose from the kitchen table and enfolded him in a hug. “It’s going to be okay,” I said, hugging him tight. “We’re going to find her, even if I have to tear the city apart.”
“Don’t lose hope,” Fenris said gruffly. “She’s not the first child to have run away, and since she does not know the city at all well, chances are good we’ll be able to track her down quickly.”
Comenius nodded, returning my embrace. His shoulders loosened slightly, but I knew he wouldn’t fully relax until his daughter was returned, safe and sound. Releasing him, I forced him to sit at the kitchen table and help us come up with a list of places to look for her. Unfortunately, we couldn’t think of where to begin—the school had been shut down for structural repairs, and Rusalia hadn’t been around long enough to make any friends.
“She’s refused to go to the replacement school on the cruise ship,” Comenius said tiredly. “She claims she cannot understand the lessons, her classmates are all horrid, and the teachers don’t want her around.”
Big surprise, I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud. “We’ll have to track her the old-fashioned way, then. By scent,” I explained at Comenius’s confused look. “Do you have a piece of clothing she’s recently worn, that Fenris can sniff? He hasn’t met her yet.”
Comenius retrieved the girl’s nightgown, and Fenris changed into wolf form before taking a good sniff. Shifters could scent things better in animal form, and we decided it was best that I stay in human form since Rusalia didn’t know Fenris. Com was clearly torn about staying behind, but we convinced him that given her hostile mood, it might be easier for us to approach her and convince her to return. She’d recognize me on sight, at least, even if she didn’t like me. Besides, if she changed her mind and returned home, she should not find the door locked. Promising Com that we’d update him as soon as we could, Fenris and I went out to the fire escape, hoping to pick up her scent from there.
“She did indeed use the fire escape to leave,” Fenris said, his bushy wolf’s tail high in the air as he sniffed the ground. “Let’s hope she did not go too far.”
Leaving the steambike parked outside Comenius’s shop, I followed Fenris on foot. A few shoppers gave us strange glances—it wasn’t unheard of for shifters to walk around in wolf form, but it was a little unusual to see one sniffing around the way Fenris was doing. We followed Rusalia’s scent all the way down to Market Street, then promptly lost it amongst the crowds of people and the delicious scents of roasting meat and baked goods.
“There are too many other scents here.” Fenris shook his great wolf head. “I do not think I will be able to pick up her trail again.”
“Dammit.” I pursed my lips, scanning the crowd, but I didn’t see any sign of Rusalia here. Had she come down this way to filch something to eat off one of the food carts, or seek shelter in a toy shop somewhere?
“Miss Baine!” someone called. I turned to see Lamar, the ham and sausage vendor I’d met with the other day, hurrying up the sidewalk toward me. “Have you made any progress in your search for that pesky arsonist?”
“I turned the case over to a unit in the Enforcers Guild,” I said, and immediately felt guilty for the way that sounded. “The new captain put together a crew specifically to investigate the fires.”
“Well, they’re not working fast enough,” Lamar groused, folding his beefy arms over his chest. “There was another incident early this morning—this time at Alice’s cart! All of her divine cinnamon buns, completely ruined.”
Fenris and I exchanged a glance. “We don’t have time for this,” he warned.
“Yeah, but I can’t just dump this again.” I turned back to the vendor. “Take us to the cart.”
Lamar escorted us to the remains, which were little more than a charred pile of wood and the strong scent of burnt sugar and bread. “My poor cart,” Alice moaned, rocking back and forth on her heels. She was a pretty blonde human, dressed in a pale yellow frock with a white apron. “I’ve had it for ten years, and it’s never failed me. I don’t know how I’ll replace it.”
“Sunaya,” Fenris said, his voice urgent. He had been sniffing the remains, but now he lifted his head, as if he’d caught something. “Rusalia was here. I would bet my tail on it.”
“Shit.” My stomach plummeted straight into my toes as the truth began to dawn on me. “Did either of you see a little blonde girl hanging around here when your carts were set on fire?” I asked both vendors.
Lamar shrugged. “I don’t know. There are many little blonde girls in Rowanville. I see dozens of them every day.”
“I might have,” Alice said suddenly, her eyes bright. “She was standing over by the produce cart, eyeing an apple. I remember because I warned Prickett, the owner—she looked like she was about to steal from him.” Her face paled. “Do you think she set my cart on fire because she was angry with me?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but I had a feeling that was exactly what happened. By Magorah, I should have considered this. Rusalia was an angry, confused child with two magical parents. Of course there was a strong likelihood that she, too, had magic, and she was about the right age for it to manifest. “But I’m going to find out.”
Energized by the promise of a lead, I questioned the other vendors who had been hit by the arsonist, with Fenris in tow. A few of them confirmed they’d seen a little girl shortly before the fire had started, and they directed us further up the neighborhood, to where other businesses and individuals had been victimized. Pretty soon, Fenris and I found ourselves a few blocks away, in a residential neighborhood.
“Hang on a second,” Fenris said, coming to a stop outside the chain link fence of a school. “Is this not where Rusalia would have gone to school?”
“Shit. You’re right.” Stuffing my hands in my pockets, I surveyed the three-story, rectangular brick building, which boasted a small playground and a track field. “Could she be hiding out here?” The wind shifted, and Fenris and I both stiffened as we caught her scent.
“She’s definitely in here,” Fenris said, taking off toward the entrance. I sprinted after him, knowing his instincts were taking over—he was on the hunt. My blood hummed in my veins in anticipation—there was no doubt Com’s daughter was hiding out in this abandoned building, the only place she could go to be alone. Why hadn’t we thought of this sooner?
The gate and entrances were all locked, with not a single guard stationed on the premises, but magic enabled us to get inside fairly easily. We moved slowly through the empty halls, and I took care not to let my boots ring out against the vinyl-tiled floors. If Rusalia was here, we didn’t want to startle her.
A normal human would have been forced to check all the rooms—and even though this was a simple elementary school, there were still over fifty of them. Luckily, Fenris had latched onto her scent strongly, and he led us straight past the classrooms, toward a door at the end of the hallway that led to a basement. My hair stood straight on end as I caught the scent of smoke—something was burning down there.
“Rusalia?” I called, summoning a flame to my hand as we descended the stairs. The bluish-green fire illuminated the large, rectangular space, crammed with old filing cabinets and shelves full of supplies. Rusalia was huddled in a corner, her hands hovering over a small fire—she was burning textbooks, I realized, to keep warm.
“You,” she shouted, jumping to her feet. Her blonde hair fanned out behind her, and I noticed she was dressed in a simple sweater and pants—not nearly enough to stay warm in this weather. There was no central heating turned on in the school right now; she had to be freezing. Her eyes widened at the sight of Fenris, still in wolf form. “Stay back!”
She hurled a ball of flame at us, but before it could hit, I countered with a spell Iannis had often used during our training sessions. With a flick of my wrist, I formed a bubble around her fireball, cutting off the oxygen completely and extinguishing the flames.
Rusalia snarled in
fury and hurled more fire at us, but I’d done this dance before, and managed to quickly counter her attacks. Fenris deflected a few of them too—even in wolf form, he was more than able to use simple magic like this.
Still, I could tell this was going to get worse before it got better. Rusalia was going to keep flinging around fire until either someone really got hurt, we set the building on fire, or she passed out from exhaustion. Neither of those three options were good.
“Fenris, I’ll cover you, just try and get to her,” I cried, stepping forward and bubbling another fireball.
“Fine,” he growled in mindspeak as he leapt over the stack of books Rusalia was using as kindling. She screamed, summoning more fire, but before she could fling it, the big wolf landed on top of her, knocking her down. As her hands smacked into the ground, the look in her eyes made my blood run cold. Fenris was so close to her that if she hit Fenris with those flaming hands, there’d be nothing I could do to stop her.
“Don’t you dare,” I shouted, taking a step forward and lifting my own hand. Magic crackled at my fingertips as I glared at her. “We’re not here to hurt you, but if you try to harm my friend, I will knock you out myself.” I lifted a hand, magic crackling at my fingertips, and she blanched.
“L-leave me alone!” she wailed, tears running down her face as the flames wreathing her hands vanished into the ether. She tried to squirm out from beneath Fenris, but he simply sat down, putting his not-inconsiderable weight on her chest.
“Fenris,” I chided, drawing closer. “Get off the poor girl. We don’t want to crush her.” I put out the fire Rusalia had started, then used another spell to heat up the air until it was comfortably warm. “Is that better?” I asked as she scrambled away from the wolf and scrunched herself into the far corner, arms wrapped around her knees.
“I…” She frowned, confused. “Did you make it warmer in here?”
“Yep.” I sat down on the hard floor in front of her, wanting to make myself more approachable. “One of the perks to being a trained mage.”
She turned up her nose at me. “A partially trained mage.”
I arched a brow, refusing to let her bait me. “Kid, I don’t think you’re in a position to make cracks like that. You’re in big trouble right now.”
She folded her arms across her chest and glared at me. “What else is new? Nothing I do is ever good enough, not for Ma, and not for Pa either. Why should I care about what other people think?”
I let out a breath—I understood that sentiment very well. I’d had a similar outlook about my aunt, especially during the last few months I’d lived with her. But now wasn’t the time to share that with Rusalia. “It would be one thing if you’d caused an accident or two at home,” I explained as patiently as I could. “But you’ve hurt a lot of other people, setting their carts and other belongings on fire—those are crimes, Rusalia. We’re not going to be able to sweep this under the rug.”
Her chin began to quiver. “Will they send me to jail?” she asked, her cornflower-blue eyes—Comenius’s eyes—wide with terror.
I shrugged, pretending not to feel pity for her. “Probably not. But someone’s going to have to pay for all those damages, and that someone is going to be your dad. And I can tell you right now he’s going to have a very hard time coming up with the money for that, after being away from his shop all those weeks to bring you back here. Also, it’s illegal for the inhabitants of Witches’ End to harbor mage children, so Comenius may be forced to hand you over to the Mages’ Guild. That, or he’ll have to send you back to Pernia.”
“No,” Rusalia cried, tears spilling down her cheeks again. She threw herself to the ground, clutching at my ankles. “Please, please don’t send me back there. I have no one there.”
“Then why are you so mean to your father?” Fenris demanded, and I started—he’d changed back into human form. I always envied how he was able shift without the usual fanfare because I never noticed when it happened. “He is your only family, is he not?”
“Y-yes,” Rusalia mumbled into my boots. “It’s just…it’s been so hard to trust him. Ma always told me he was a bad man, and he just left me with her.”
There was so much vitriol in that last statement, such a sense of deep betrayal, that I couldn’t help feeling sympathy for the little girl. Burying a hand in her tangled locks, I gentled my voice. “Why don’t you tell us what happened, Rusalia? From the beginning.”
And so she did. Slowly, painfully, Rusalia told us in a tearful voice about how her mother raised her, neglecting her for days at a time, and then taking her out for ice cream and lavish shopping trips where Rusalia could buy any toy her heart desired. The inconsistent behavior had confused Rusalia—she’d been punished for imagined slights, then rewarded spontaneously and without rhyme or reason. Eventually, the poor child had given up on figuring out what her mother wanted and how to predict her moods.
The woman had also drilled into Rusalia’s head that her father, Comenius, was a deadbeat who didn’t care about her. When Rusalia did something wrong, her mother would rail at her, shouting she was just like her useless, hateful father. As Rusalia grew older and began acting out more, her mother started spending less time with her, punishing her more frequently.
“I…I think I killed her,” she said in a hollow voice, a faraway look in her eyes. She was leaning against Fenris now, who had joined us on the floor, and his arm was around her. “The day she died, she’d locked me up in my room for smashing one of her potions. She was in her potion workshop in the backyard, and all I could think about was how much I hated her, and then…and then…” She hiccupped, her eyes filling with tears again. “The workshop caught on fire.”
“And you were in your room?” Fenris asked, not a shred of judgment in his voice. When she only nodded, he said, “It takes very strong magic to start fires from a distance. And strong magic is very hard to control for a beginner.”
“He’s right,” I said, meeting her tearful gaze. “I had a lot of trouble controlling my magic at first, too. Whatever might have happened to your mother that day, it wasn’t your fault. It was an accident.”
“It wasn’t,” Rusalia wailed, throwing her head back and tearing at her hair. “I hated her so much then. I just wanted her to die! And she did! It’s all my fault!”
She collapsed into a puddle, weeping. Fenris reached for her, intending to console her. Just as he touched her shoulder, a powerful vibration, stronger than any of the ones we’d felt previously, rocked the earth beneath us. The basement walls shuddered, and something above us groaned.
“W-what is that?” Rusalia whimpered, lifting her tearstained face from the earth. The sound of something heavy collapsing sent a burst of fear through me.
“We’ve gotta get out of here.” Heart thundering in my chest, I scooped Rusalia into my arms and turned toward the exit. “Fenris, let’s go!”
Another tremor, even stronger than the last, shook the walls and floor as we ran for the stairs. I nearly tripped as I fought to keep my balance with the child in my arms, and that was when the quake chose to strike with full force. The three of us went crashing into the back wall as the very ground churned beneath our feet, and the sound of the roof and walls above the earth tumbling down sent a flash of horror through me. Magorah save us, we were about to be buried alive!
“Shield,” Fenris cried as a huge chunk of the basement roof caved. He threw himself atop Rusalia, who’d fallen to the floor, and we both shouted the spell the Garaian Emperor had used during his trials to stop that wall from falling on him.
A blue shield burst into life overhead. Chunks of concrete bounced off it and rained down around us. Only we hadn’t quite been quick enough because one of those chunks struck me in the left shin. Sharp agony radiated through my leg as the bone fractured, ripping an involuntary scream from me.
Fenris cried out in pain as well, the scent of his blood filling the air. I twisted toward the sound frantically, trying to stamp down my own pain and see what
had happened to him and Rusalia.
And that, of course, was when the lights went out.
16
Between Fenris and I, we managed to stop the worst of the rubble from falling on us. But even with the two of us working together, we weren’t strong enough to put up a shield to cover all three of us completely without using up every ounce of magic we had. As a result, a huge chunk of concrete had fallen on my exposed left leg, crushing it. Fenris had been hit by debris before the shield had come down fully—his left sleeve was shredded where rubble had hit him, and his hips had been crushed by a steel girder. It was a miracle Rusalia hadn’t been hit by it, and I couldn’t believe Fenris was conscious enough to continue powering the spell.
“Nooo.” Rusalia sobbed beneath him. To our horror, a huge ball of flame burst into life within our shield. Fenris used his magic to snuff it out immediately, but it was too late—I’d felt the huge whoosh of air as the flame had immediately begun sucking on oxygen.
“Put her to sleep, then heal yourself,” Fenris ordered. His dark hair was matted with sweat, and his jaw clenched with effort. “I will focus on maintaining the shield as you do.”
I did as Fenris said, pulling Rusalia from beneath his torso before she was suffocated, and using a sleep spell to render her unconscious. As for my leg, I judged the severity of the break as best I could, then decided I wouldn’t heal it completely. I had little experience with healing as yet, and doing so would be another huge drain on my magic. Fenris, hurt even worse than I was, didn’t have enough power to hold the shield for long, and I needed to heal him, too. Instead, I staunched the blood flow, then used my power to give a little boost to my shifter body’s natural healing process. On its own, my leg would heal fully in a couple of hours—now it would be within the next sixty minutes.
Unfortunately, I didn’t think we had that much time.