Twisted Legends: Twisted Magic Book 4

by Kaye, Rainy

  With the last bags inside, Sasmita and Bhaskar stepped up into the motorhome, one at a time, followed by Fiona who half-crawled as she slunk up through the door and disappeared. Otilia reached down and grabbed the ice chest handle and hauled it up the steps with her.

  Randall pulled me tighter to him as he walked us toward the motorhome, and despite myself, I buried my face in his side and sucked in a breath. He smelled clean, like his old self, and I took a moment to enjoy the nostalgia of lazy weekends lounging around my living room before I parted from him and staggered up the steps into the motorhome, blanket pulled around my shoulders.

  Inside, the three portraits posed a bottleneck as everyone tried to find a place for themselves around the enormous framed entities. I shuffled past Bhaskar to claim the bed that doubled as a storage shelf right before the driver’s seat. As I wormed my way through people and belongings, I caught Otilia standing, staring at the portrait in front.

  Yuto.

  Her eyes shimmered with long ago memories, some of them happy and several terrible. Her heart had been shattered the day this portrait had been painted into existence. Her animosity toward Bhaskar was not anger; it was hurt. Betrayal. Helplessness.

  The person who had once been the world’s greatest hunter had not just been stripped of her powers. She had lost her dignity, her identity, and the man she loved most.

  She touched the portrait, briefly. Then she sucked in a breath and turned away to lug the ice chest under the table.

  I pushed around the tote bags and placed a few in a corner to make room for me to curl up like a doodlebug on one side of the bed-shelf. The blanket padded me into the small space until it grew uncomfortably warm. I poked out a bare foot to cool off and remembered I hadn’t grabbed my boots and socks from inside the house.

  Stifling a groan, I started to dig myself out of my spot. My boots sat by the oven, socks draped over them. My team had been hustling while I slept.

  I would feel bad about my laziness later. For now, I pulled the blanket over my face, cocooning myself except for the foot, as I turned to face the low ceiling of the compartment.

  Sleep seduced me back into bliss. I woke to the motorhome jostling along down the road as we headed towards our destination.

  “Then we’ll fight them,” Otilia said, and I had clearly missed the beginning of the conversation.

  Any impending fight sounded like something I should be concerned about, though. I listened, my eyes closed because I did not possess the energy to open them. The blanket remained over my face.

  “They sent Kurash,” Bhaskar said. “I don’t know how long I could have evaded the dogs, even covering my scent, but it was only a matter of time until he found me. The soldiers didn’t rest for days.”

  “Kurash only impresses himself,” Otilia spat.

  “Maybe to a hunter such as you,” Bhaskar said with surprising admiration. “I understand why he didn’t come for you and just sent his captains—there was a good chance his own head would stain your carpet—but for the rest of us, Kurash has earned the fear and respect his name invokes.”

  “So what do we do about him?” I said with a groan from under the blanket. “Tell me he can’t follow us here.”

  No one replied, and I pulled the cover off my face, turning my head to peer at the others tucked into seats and corners around the motorhome. Sasmita stood to the side of my bed, one hand covered the spot where the vial rested under her shirt.

  “Kurash can access anywhere,” Bhaskar said. “He will not give up the hunt just because we escaped the island pocket.”

  “You,” I said. “You escaped. He has no reason to want me.”

  “Except you were on the island, where you didn’t belong, and then helped Bhaskar escape,” Otilia said.

  I knew that.

  With a sigh, I said, “You could have warned me,” but I didn’t really mean it. Even if Otilia had told me all about Kurash and his soldiers and their hellhounds, I still would have gone.

  My sense of self-preservation had long shriveled up, apparently.

  Otilia must have known it was nonsense too, because she didn’t respond. Instead, she said, “I suggest we don’t spend too much energy on concern about Kurash. He will come or he won’t, and there’s nothing we can do to sway his decision either way. For now, we just need to retrieve the medallion and reach Yuto before the consortium sends a new hunter.”

  My skin prickled with all the terrible news she had delivered in a few breaths. Kurash may or may not hunt us, and the consortium…

  “They haven’t sent a new hunter?” I asked, staring up at the low ceiling of the bed-shelf. “We’re…on our own still?”

  Bhaskar and Otilia shared a look that clearly asked which one of them should break the news to me.

  It was so great they were bonding over my ignorance.

  Bhaskar ran two fingers down the backside of Uwe’s frame, propped up against the bench seat where he sat. “There’s usually only one hunter.”

  “What?” I sat upright, smacking my forehead on the shelf ceiling, but it was more of an annoyance than painful. “Joseph Stone was the only hunter?”

  “They aren’t easy to train,” Otilia said. “Or kill.”

  “So there’s just…nobody?” Being stuck lying down while anger bubbled through me wasn’t helping my mood, but I was also too tired to roll off the shelf so I remained where I was. “They didn’t think to have a backup? Even Coca-Cola gives the recipe to at least two people.”

  “There’s a mentee, of sorts,” Bhaskar said, glancing at Otilia for confirmation, and she nodded. “But deploying one that isn’t ready…”

  I let out a frustrated growl. “Well, I’m not doing it anymore. They can take their damn portraits and set loose a whole gaggle of mentees for all I care. This is not my job.”

  “Then why are you doing it?” Bhaskar asked.

  The question was innocent enough—if anything about this entire situation could be—but my cup of anger runneth over.

  I half rolled, half flopped out of the bed, landing on my feet, the blankets puddling around me. I was chasing the dark witches and mages because I had to, it was in me, somehow. My magic beckoned me, enticed me. It demanded I use it, push it to its limits, let it become larger, until it swallowed me up.

  Instead, I simply said, “Because who else will?”

  The slacked realization on their faces brought me an unnecessary amount of joy. Perhaps it wasn’t my only reason for continuing this adventure, but it certainly was an undeniable one.

  No one else was stupid enough to keep going.

  “Saf,” Randall said gently, pushing to his feet from where he sat on a storage bench by the stove. “You really should get some more rest.”

  I looked over Otilia’s head at him.

  “It’s true, though. Otilia can’t hunt anymore, even if she wanted to. Bhaskar can’t risk putting himself in the line of fire. So while the consortium plays Eeny-Meeny with everyone’s lives, it’s just you and me and—" I spun around to face Sasmita in the driver seat. “And what the hell did you mean by your son?”

  Sasmita wilted in her spot, but the urge to confess her darkest secrets crossed her face.

  “I don’t know why they took him,” she said, voice soft.

  “Who?” The question exploded out of me like a punctured balloon. I waved my hands around. “Why didn’t you tell us you have a son?”

  “I don’t know who, either,” she said, somehow measured despite me bouncing off the walls.

  “Is that who needs the blood?” I asked.

  Otilia’s head snapped up.

  “What blood is Safiya talking about?” she asked, storming toward Sasmita, but the effect was diluted as she had to squish around enormous picture frames to reach her. “Are you working with a bounty hunter?”

  Sasmita shrank back in her seat. “I’m not supposed to discuss it.”

  Otilia gave her a look that clearly read whatever Sasmita had been threatened was insignifi
cant compared to denying the once great huntress.

  Sasmita sighed heavily. She seemed to be relieved to be defeated, though. “They are the only ones who could get a lead on my son. They got him back…but they won’t return him to me until I pay them.”

  Not with cash, apparently.

  “The last honorable bounty hunter died out around the same time as the popularity of sonnets,” Otilia said. “It should go without saying, whoever you are working with, they are not helping you out of kindness.”

  Despite her expression, Otilia’s words carried a great amount of concern.

  “My son is eight,” Sasmita said, as if that answered everything—and it did. No matter the bounty hunter’s ulterior motive, she had no recourse. Leaving behind her son was not an option for her.

  Now, not for me either.

  “I’m going back to sleep,” I muttered, picking up my blanket.

  I was going to need all the rest I could get; my to do list was getting longer by the second.

  Helping Yuto, as it turned out, was just the beginning.

  We needed to survive that first, though.

  20

  I woke to the feeling of the motorhome slowing to a halt, and I willed it to pick up speed again. The trip couldn’t be over that soon, could it? My brain had been unconscious for nearly the entire drive and I couldn’t determine if I had slept eight hours, or eight minutes. My body felt both to be true.

  “I’ll wake Saf,” Randall muttered, from somewhere beyond the blanket tent I had draped over my face. He sounded as if he had only recently woken up too.

  The noise of the ice chest opening and closing reminded me we had food, and my stomach was hollow.

  “She’s awake,” I grumbled, flinging back the blanket, and then batting at it as it hit the low ceiling and fell back toward me. “Where are we at?”

  Everyone sat nearly where they had been when I had closed my eyes, but there weren’t many places to move around to in the trailer, not between the crew we had gathered and the three enormous portraits that took up more than the center of the floor.

  Sasmita was nowhere to be seen, but I figured she must be in the driver seat behind my sleeping area.

  “Less than two hours away,” Randall said, unscrewing the end of a flashlight that could knock a man out with a solid swing. He dumped the batteries from the flashlight body into his hand and leaned forward to place them in the drawer by the sink so they didn’t scatter around everywhere. “We figured it was a good time to eat and discuss the plan of action more in-depth.”

  I rolled out of the cubby since there was no possible way to sit up in it and leaned against a counter, inches from where Fiona huddled with a blanket. Somehow, she looked like a frightened child who would also possibly smother someone in their sleep.

  Guilt sparked in my chest. I should have made sure she was tucked in and comfortable before I had gone to sleep. Randall had likely picked up my slack, but it wasn’t his job to look after her.

  I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand and then squinted out the side of a thin curtain over a window. We had parked on the shoulder of a small road, pulled up next to an expanse of trees. A deeper chill hung in the air, despite the heat puffing from an overhead vent.

  Without a word, Otilia unloaded sandwich-making supplies from the ice chest. Bhaskar pulled a loaf of Ezekiel bread from a tote stored on the bench table seat where he sat and helped her prepare and paper-plate food.

  No one had bothered to put any of the goods into the cabinets and storage benches, because our trip would be over in no time. Soon we would be knee-deep in who knew what, undertaking some unholy task to retrieve another medallion. I didn’t want to be here, and I mentally kicked myself for not just going back to Orangewood Grove and manhandling Yuto back into his prison. I didn’t need to fix every damn problem I ran across, did I? Was I always obligated to do the right thing? Couldn’t I just phone it in once in a while?

  Wasn’t it acceptable to let Randall tuck in Fiona without guilt eating at my self-esteem for the rest of the week?

  As Otilia slathered together sandwiches and sliced Pink Lady apples, I stayed out of the way. There wasn’t anywhere to go without knocking into supplies or people or portraits. I was pretty much boxed in by Nikandros’ glower and Fiona’s naively vicious expression and a pack of thirty rolls of toilet paper that I had no idea when that manifested, but apparently we had strange worries about this trip.

  Otilia handed me a paper plate with a roasted red pepper hummus and avocado veggie sandwich, and I smiled. Even between being falsely accused of causing the biggest disaster since Congress and being hours from reuniting with her very-long lost love, she remembered I’d been vegetarian since I was fifteen.

  It was the little things.

  These were my people. Just like with Ever and her sisters, we had found help and alliances in strange places. We weren’t all on the same path, but here we were, finding a common ground, putting aside little things—like how Bhaskar had imprisoned Otilia’s love, and how Sasmita had kept a pretty significant secret from all of us, or how I could be, admittedly, bitter and inconsistent—and pushing forward because, despite all of our own motivations, there was a bigger picture here.

  Otilia wasn’t just saving Yuto; she was protecting the world from his out of control powers too.

  Sasmita wasn’t just saving her son; she was helping us put away the dark witches and mages.

  Bhaskar wasn’t just running from Kurash and his soldiers; he was helping right a wrong he had committed hundreds of years ago.

  And Randall wasn’t here just because he was a good friend. When he glanced up at me, as he screwed the flashlight cap over the new batteries, I caught a look in his eyes, one I had seen countless times over the years, one that grew with intensity each time I let myself notice it.

  Randall was here because he loved me.

  I bit into my sandwich to hide the dumb grin I couldn’t suppress. Maybe we couldn’t be anything more, but for the moment, it felt good to be someone other than a hunter.

  “So,” I said around the next bite of sandwich, “do we know where the medallion is, exactly, on the property?”

  “Oh, that,” Otilia said with the wave of the mayonnaise knife. “Ruediger von der Aa spent his whole life chasing that medallion, and he refused to be parted from it in death. When his family immigrated to Minnesota in the 1850s, they brought his casket with him and later built a shrine on their property. In their small village in Germany, it was known that touching his casket could fix many ailments.”

  She snickered, and it took me a minute to catch on.

  “People thought their magic was an illness?” I asked.

  “Well, other people’s magic,” she said, dropping the knife into the small metal sink with a clatter. “If your neighbor is truly hexing your cattle, then there’s one way to stop that, isn’t there?”

  “Strip their powers,” I said more to myself than to her.

  She nodded. “The hands that touched the casket and activated the medallion weren’t often willing.”

  I shook off the thought, literally. The last few days had already given me enough to chew on that wasn’t nearly as tasty as this sandwich. I finished off my food as my still-waking brain slogged through mental math.

  “The van der Aas brought dead grandpa’s casket with them when they immigrated and built a shrine,” I said slowly. “So, it’s a shrine with his dead body in it…Basically, we’re going inside a mausoleum. Great. Because nothing strange has ever happened in one of those.”

  I gave Randall a knowing look.

  Otilia plucked an apple slice from her plate on the counter and crunched into it, raising her eyebrow.

  Randall flushed, but barely. “We found an espial map in one in New Orleans.”

  “Oh? Do you still have it?” she asked, about the time I realized she had thought I’d insinuated something dirty had gone down in a tomb.

  I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or jot down a n
ew entry on my bucket list.

  Sasmita piped up from where she sat sideways at the driver seat with her plate.

  “It’s in my bag.” She nodded toward her backpack propped by the locked door. “The bounty hunter told me where each portrait had turned up, and I use the map to help narrow it down from there. Or try.”

  “Yeah, with all the magic happening, it’s basically just a page full of blinking lights,” I said as another thought occurred to me. “Why is there so much magic lately? I mean, I get the dark witches and mages are causing destruction and enchanting towns and whatever else their precious little hearts feel like, but…what about the monsters?”

  “The cockatrice belonged to the wielders,” Randall said, setting aside his empty plate. He brushed his hands together. “So it seemed, anyway.”

  Otilia’s hand hovered over another apple slice. “Come again?”

  “It’s this whole…other thing,” I said, waving my plate a little, dropping a few crumbs. “There’s another group that’s seeking out the dark witches and mages, apparently.”

  As I spoke the words, they put me right in my place: I was one of three different people hunting the dark witches and mages. I wanted to put them back in their prisons—or save one, now, as it were—Sasmita’s bounty hunter wanted their blood for some reason, and the tentacle magic wielders hunted them because…?

  We still had no answer there, either.

  I knew more now than when I’d met Arlo Miller, but this situation was a bit like taking a chisel to an iceberg.

  “I’m not sure who those people are or why they would have a cockatrice,” Otilia said, retracting her hand from the apple slices as her expression soured. “They are either brave or foolish, and neither is anything to get caught up in.”

  “Besides them and the cockatrice,” I said. My plate was empty, but my stomach was full and content. I leaned forward to dump the crumbs into the sink and then set the plate on the counter next to it. “Also, we know Louvel the Devourer lived in the swamp already, just undiscovered—or unspoken about. But we’ve seen all kinds of bizarre creatures, like fish-face in the lake in Haven Rock? They couldn’t have always been there, could they?”