Twisted Legends: Twisted Magic Book 4

by Kaye, Rainy

  Now, while Sasmita was truly a formidable witch in her own right, and she had taught me a few things in our quest to defeat Winston, the truth was, we were both tadpoles in a pond of frog-eating snakes. Just as Joseph Stone had been a proficient mage, Bhaskar too wielded powers unlike what Sasmita and I managed. Not just wielded, but shaped, hammered. Twisted. He was an expert blacksmith at the magical forge at which I had just been tinkering.

  I had certainly shaped my magic into impressive creations from time to time, but until I could do so with the skill and ease promised in the Dark Lands, I was still not ready for the role I had somehow appointed myself.

  Sasmita too was at odds with what she could do, and what she had to do. It was no wonder she had stayed with our group for so long. She needed us as much as we needed her.

  We really were in this together.

  “Ladies first,” Bhaskar said with a grin at Otilia, but when she scowled, he headed into the dim doorway.

  Otilia strode in behind him, and I shuffled after them. Randall stayed no more than an arm’s length away from me.

  Inside was no less underwhelming in detail than outside, but the low uneven ceiling and simple worn red brick walls coated with a fine powder of dust probably knocked loose from Bhaskar’s magic had a certain kind of creepy charm, like the structure refused to be mistaken for anything other than a crypt.

  A few paces through the empty entrance chamber, the floor stepped down behind a metal gate that hung open. The lack of a substantial lock assured me that the barricade was open only because of the blast and it would be hysterical of me to find it to be a warning or an omen.

  I did, anyway.

  Despite the lack of electrical lights or catacomb-like sconces or a simple window, the interior remained lit enough to see down past the gate. The opening to the outside was nearly the width of two people and ample sunlight streamed through, as well as a continual trickle of cold air. Inside the crypt had proven to be warmer than outside.

  Beyond the gate, four caskets rested on two long stone catafalques, two caskets on each side of a short wide aisle.

  “There’s more people down here than I had expected,” I said, barely above a whisper, as if I might wake Mr. van der Aa. “Do we know which coffin is his?”

  “I think there’s plaques under them,” Sasmita said.

  She maneuvered around us in the small space and headed toward the open gate.

  Given what we had faced in the last few days, pilfering a dead man’s belongings should be simple, even laughable, but I still had to force myself to near the deceased. As I stepped down to the bottom of the stairs and stood in between the row with Sasmita, I could envision the tomb lids sliding open and the skeletal remains rising up.

  Given Uwe the necromancer’s portrait rested a few yards away in the motorhome, in front of the main house, maybe the fear wasn’t too farfetched.

  Sasmita bent to inspect the first plaque mounted on the front of the catafalques.

  “Helga van der Aa,” she read out loud before shuffling over to the next plaque. “Ruediger. That’s him, right?”

  I nodded, repressing the urge to ask Sasmita to be careful around the medallion—Otilia had said it didn’t work that way—and started toward her as everyone else behind us moved closer together, nearing the gate.

  Ruediger’s casket lid jutted forward, off the end, right toward Sasmita. With a yelp, she jumped backwards, magic flaring to life on her hands.

  I stumbled backwards and tripped on the step. I landed hard on my ass, right on the edge of the stairs.

  The casket lid shot the rest of the way forward, slamming end-first into the floor with a bang. It clattered over to the side.

  Ruediger sat straight up. He was well preserved for being dead a few hundred years.

  I scrambled backwards, throat snapping tight around any sounds that tried to escape.

  Without a look at us, Ruediger grabbed the edge of his eternal bed and hefted himself to his feet, as if he were a bit stiff but nothing a short walk wouldn’t fix.

  Sasmita stumbled into the opposite catafalque as the casket on the far end shoved open from inside. As the next one behind her shot open, she slammed her back into the far wall, out of the way. All four lids stood at angles, blocking her from the gate—and me from her.

  She glowed blue, but her magic remained undecided—or stunned. Ruediger was already on his feet, and his family members were crawling out of their beds, as if they were all about to go get pancakes at IHOP together.

  “Uwe must be loose,” I said, choking on every word. My palms pressed hard into the stone steps, grinding the thin skin until it burned. Still, I could not ease up the tension in my arms. “The portraits—That means—”

  Before I could get my thoughts in coherent fashion and out of my numb mouth, Bhaskar’s voice broke through my cloudy brain.

  “I told you my magic was rusty,” he said, but not at me.

  Stiffly—but nearly as much as ol’ dead Ruediger over there—I turned my head just enough to look at Bhaskar. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his gaze fixed on the animated corpses, his mouth puckered in an annoyed grimace instead of the sheer terror that ping-ponged between Sasmita and me.

  “That’s…” I swallowed but my throat burned. “You did this?”

  He tossed his hands up and strode toward the gate. “Shit happens, I guess.”

  I started to ask him to clarify both shit and happens.

  Ruediger dove off the catafalque with a snarl, right at Sasmita. She twisted, unleashing blue magic bolts at him. He staggered back a few steps, and then started toward her again. His other family members spun around, prune-y dead lips pulled back in snarls that revealed shriveled, rotting away gums.

  Behind me, Randall crouched and shot his dagger across the floor, towards me. It slid in my direction, spinning around, and I stretched to grab it.

  I shoved off the steps, lunging forward, and I swung at the nearest animated corpse. She thrusted out her arm, and the blade bit down in her flesh. Her skin pulled in an unnatural way, paper thin and draped over her muscles but not entirely attached. She twisted her arm around, smacking her palm into my face. I stumbled back, and my lower back slammed into the edge of the opposite catafalque. My eyes watered as pain vibrated up my spine.

  She hopped down and swung her withering arms toward me. I scrambled around the propped-up lid, onto the catafalque.

  With Ruediger to one side, and Helga on the other, still finding her bearings, and the wall right behind me—I had effectively trapped myself. The woman whose name I had missed used one hand to hop up onto the stone platform with me.

  From just beyond the gate, Bhaskar seemed more annoyed than terrified, but Sasmita and I had that covered. Randall started toward us, but Bhaskar put out his arm to halt him. He frowned, as if he were assessing the right magical weapon to hammer up into existence.

  He raised one hand.

  A low, dark grumble filled the chamber. Fiona sprang forward, knocking Bhaskar to the side. Randall and Otilia sidestepped as she flung herself past the gate. Her sole hit the edge of the catafalque opposite me, and the world erupted in flames.

  The dagger clattered from my hand as I ducked down, wrapping my arms around my torso. Heat rolled over my skin, my hair, consuming the air in my lungs. Around me, Fiona sprung off the walls as the corpses swept at her.

  An arm hooked under my armpit. I pulled back, unable to breathe. The arm hoisted me up. Through the blinding flames about to incinerate me inside out, I made out the silhouette of Randall. He hoisted me down from the catafalque and up the steps, into the main crypt chamber.

  Sasmita was already resting in a crumpled heap near Otilia, out of reach of the flames. She gasped for air, tears streaming down her face.

  My brain smoldered with the heat of the flames and the vision of them seared into my mind. I wanted to ask for clarification, wanted to look at what was happening. Instead, I found myself on the floor, coughing as I sucked in b
urning trickles of air, not quite able to take in a full lung yet.

  “Come on, we got to get out of here,” Randall said as smoke billowed past the gate, overtaking our small refuge.

  He knelt to help hoist me to my feet. Bhaskar assisted Sasmita, still heaving for air and choking on each breath.

  “But…” I started, and the word felt like it should come out in a breath of smoke.

  Down in the burning crypt, on the floor, rested a small metal object. I would know those damn things anywhere.

  It was the medallion.

  Unable to speak, I ducked under Randall’s arms and padded on hands and knees toward the stairs. Flames danced and undulated around me as I plunged back into their midst, weaving as they reached out to touch me. My hand slammed onto the medallion, and I scrambled to pluck it up off the floor as my fingertips singed from the enclosing heat.

  The skeletal van der Aa family laid in twitching piles of flames.

  I scurried back up the stairs and, hunched over, stumbled toward the exit as everyone filed out into the cool air.

  The chilled wind stabbed me like a blade into my lungs. My knees collapsed, and I tightened my hold on the medallion. I couldn’t see it, not through the tears blurring my vision, but I recognized how it felt in my grasp, not unlike the one I used to unlock the portal to the portraits, or the one I had stolen to try to control the cockatrice.

  I closed my eyes, willing away the heat. My thoughts came back together, piece by piece sifted from the ashes.

  “Fiona.” My eyes snapped open, and I tipped my head back, my stomach churning with the motion, to look up at Randall. “She’s…”

  A noise caught my attention—a footstep, but barely—and I turned toward the mausoleum, cringing as my skin pulsed with agony.

  Inside, the flames had taken over, and with the red brick walls, it was little more than a kiln now. A dark figure moved inside, just before the doorway. A moment later, Fiona stepped out.

  Flames danced on her skin and in the next breath, they extinguished.

  The apartment fire in Orangewood Grove. We had left Fiona to sleep, and the apartment had spontaneously erupted into flames, from the unit where we had been squatting.

  What were the odds?

  I found myself wanting to avoid her face, but my gaze drifted upward, to her eyes anyway.

  I expected to see the monster there—the creature she had been turning into since the moment we had found her in New Orleans. I expected the predatory gaze, the defiant harbinger of something worse to come. The snarling violent animal we could not quite look away from in fear of her next move.

  Instead, I saw…Fiona.

  She looked at me with the same desperation of needing me to help her escape the drunk guy at the bar that kept encroaching on her personal space. With the seriousness of when I refused to take practical advice that was good for me.

  Of the love we had developed over so many years of simply not letting the other one down.

  Fiona—my Fiona—was in there. I knew without any doubt.

  She, not the monster, had saved us.

  With magic.

  I wanted to stop right there, plant myself down, and try one more time to communicate with my best friend as she surfaced from the depths of darkness that pulled her under. But even as I opened my mouth to speak, she sank away again, in her eyes, in her mind.

  Then she was gone.

  A cry caught in the back of my throat and tears—not just from the flames this time—welled up in my eyes. I let myself cry because no one would know it wasn’t from the smoke inhalation, and I didn’t care even if they did.

  Numbly, I rose to my feet, clutching the medallion in front of me. I had to keep going.

  We didn’t have forever to get to Yuto and strip him of his magic.

  We didn’t have forever until we had to ask the consortium to put the portraits back in the vault before Nikandros and Uwe returned.

  We didn’t have forever before I couldn’t keep doing this—all of it—anymore.

  Silently, we loaded up in the motorhome and I sat, medallion tight in my fist, as we drove toward Orangewood Grove and the dark mage that waited.

  We had one chance to save him.

  If it failed, I had no choice: I would have to put him back.

  22

  Nothing makes people more familiar—and more annoyed—with each other than being crammed together and driving for twenty-eight hours straight through. Randall and Sasmita swapped off driving while the other rested. Otilia and Bhaskar spoke terse words about nothing that meant everything. Fiona huddled under her blanket.

  I stared at the wall, clutching the medallion.

  It was our only hope at saving Yuto, but it was more than that. It had become symbolic of my ability to change the course of this impending disaster. We had set out to put the dark witches and mages back into their portraits, but our intentions had evolved from that. Somehow, we were righting wrongs centuries in the making.

  More than anything, if I couldn’t save Yuto from his fate, how could I save anyone?

  Fiona. Randall. Sasmita’s son.

  Me.

  This was the true test if I could divert the inevitable. If I could make decisions and see them through, and not just roll from one disaster to another.

  If I could be, for lack of a better term, the next huntress, even if I didn’t yet have the consortium’s blessings.

  All of that rested on the medallion in my hand.

  I woke from a restless nap to the motorhome swaying on the road. Randall was at the wheel, Sasmita curled in a ball next to Fiona, fast asleep. Her hand rested on her heart, but I knew she was actually touching the vial on her necklace, her only peace of mind that one day, she would be reunited with her son.

  I stretched up to peer out the bottom of the window next to the table where Bhaskar dozed on the seating bench.

  Outside, flat brush stretched on, but I couldn’t tell which side of the state lines we were on.

  “How far to Orangewood Grove?” I asked in a low hoarse voice.

  Randall replied without looking away from the road, “We’re in New Mexico, just past Albuquerque, so a few hours yet.”

  He wanted to say more, I could tell, but he didn’t.

  I stuffed the van der Aa medallion into my pocket, my fingers aching with relief, and then crawled forward so my head was next to the driver’s seat. Outside the windshield, litter and dust swept across the road in large whirls that beat against the motorhome.

  “Some storm,” I murmured, raising my attention to the nearly cloudless blue sky. “What’s the weatherman say?”

  “Clear skies with a chance of mage magic,” Randall said but his focus was on the road.

  My heart skipped once, twice.

  “This can’t be Yuto, can it?” I asked Randall and avoided looking at Otilia, because I already knew the answer.

  Yuto’s magic had magnified far faster and greater than any of the other dark witches and mages so far. Eliza Brown had not extended her reach much farther than Green River; Nikandros had only bulldozed the New Orleans area; Uwe had infected Haven Rock and the surrounding mountainside, but even that wasn’t a wild feat, considering Haven Rock had the population of a music festival.

  We had been in another state when the fork had hopped up and led us to Orangewood Grove, but here now, this storm was something else entirely. The realization made my stomach shrink with terror.

  The destruction was spreading.

  I sat back on my heels and watched until my legs needed to stretch out. I resumed my nap against the propped up backpacks, but part of my brain stayed alert, noting every nuance of the storm as we approached Arizona. The motorhome rattled in the wind as we crossed the state line and dipped down toward Orangewood Grove, unincorporated.

  As we neared Phoenix, the motorhome slowed, and I peeked with one eye, tipping my head a little to see out the windshield. The road and everything around it had been engulfed in brown. Wind beat at the side of
the motorhome, and Randall gripped the steering wheel, jaw clenched.

  “Dust storm,” I muttered. “Haboob, if you will. They’re normal here.”

  “Right, yep, and I can’t see a damn thing,” he said.

  What should have taken another two hours crept into three as we made our way past the dust storm and then floored it the rest of the way to Orangewood Grove, despite the wind that battered the windows and rattled the siding.

  I let the sound lull me into a fake sleep, one that provided rest for my body but not my mind. Despite having had twenty-eight hours to rest and eat, I didn’t feel rejuvenated. I had just played the same thought on repeat:

  Everyone needed me and my twisted magic, if not because I could, but because I would try.

  So much came after this moment, and yet it would determine everything.

  I couldn’t fail.

  Finally, the motorhome slowed and this time, it wasn’t because of the storm.

  I started to sit forward just as Randall said, “Uh…Someone wanna come look at this?”

  I stomach-crunched into a sitting position and crawled forward as everyone gathered around.

  Before us, where Orangewood Grove had sat, was nothing but a big empty field with broken pipes and snapped cables, cracked foundations missing their structures, and no mage in sight.

  23

  “It’s…gone,” I said, with my keen sense for the obvious, as I stared out the windshield at where Orangewood Grove had been.

  I didn’t have to ask Randall if he was sure he hadn’t taken the wrong turn at Albuquerque. What would have been here, if not the town that had been blown away by an out of control mage?

  Or perhaps it had sprouted spider legs and walked off.

  Either way, Orangewood Grove was no longer where it had been and neither was Yuto.

  Without speaking, we all ambled toward the motorhome door. I stood and waited for Randall as he took a moment to stare at the scene before joining me and following the others. The wind held the door shut, but Bhaskar used a little gust of blue magic to beat it back enough to allow the door to swing up. The wind plastered the door to the side of the motorhome.