by Kaye, Rainy
I ducked my head against the dirt and rubbish billowing around, and for a moment, I even hoped for a sign of Frank the trash monster. Anything that might give us a clue as to where Yuto might be.
Instead, we picked our way through tipped over trash bins and jettisoned cracked beams. It wasn’t like New Orleans, where the city had collapsed in on itself. Here, the town was just…gone.
Nearby, Otilia parted from the pack, her face set in a deep, eyebrow-furrowing scowl. She wasn’t grimacing from just the windstorm, though. Perhaps she had spent the last few days mentally playing the moment she would be reunited with Yuto after so long. Generations after generations of lovers had met, fallen in love, lived, and then died together in the time she had waited to see him again.
I wanted to comfort her, but how could I? I had no way of understanding her pain. Despite good intentions, I had nothing to offer her.
Then, she lifted her head, a fierceness in her eyes that halted me in my step.
She straightened upright, her expression smoothing. “I know where he is.”
24
Santa Monica Pier lay seven hours west from where we were, and an enormous storm stood between us and it. The bigger issue, however, was that the pier had been built in 1909, which was quite a few years after Yuto had been imprisoned and cut off from the outside world. I wasn’t quite sure how Otilia had done the math to find him.
“Many years ago, I had gone to Dagmara to ask her…” Otilia trailed off, letting the sound of the wind drown out the pause in her sentence.
I leaned forward, across from her at the motorhome table. Outside, rain drops splattered against the window, coming down sideways in the wind. The sky had filled with proper dark gray clouds to match the storm that accompanied our approach to the Pacific Ocean.
“How?” I prodded. “How do you know where Yuto is?”
She turned her lips inward around her teeth, pressing them together, before relenting.
“In a moment of sadness, I asked Dagmara to tell me if I would ever be reunited with Yuto,” Otilia said, her voice nearly lost as the rain pelted the roof.
It sounded as if Kurash’s army marched above us.
“She divined the future, in both a sketching and words, and told me I would find him where people walked above water amidst bands of color, over a forest of trees without roots. Dagmara had proven herself—as I mentioned, she came from a line of well-respected witches and, well, you’ve seen her house—but her words brought me no comfort until 1996.” Otilia shook her head, sad smile in place. “Pacific Park, of all things. I had recognized it the moment it was built, but couldn’t imagine how Yuto would find himself there, locked away in the vault as he was.”
I nodded slowly. “When we arrive, do you want me to do it, or you?”
“Me,” she said softly, sliding her hand, palm up, across the table toward me. “I have waited so long to free him where I had failed.”
Even though I had intended to use the van der Aa medallion on him, even though I considered the dark witches and mages my problem until the consortium reconvened, I retrieved the medallion from my pocket and placed it in her open palm. Her fingers snapped around it like a carnivorous plant, and she closed her eyes, sucking in a shuddering breath.
The motorhome listed to the side.
Everyone yelped, scrambling for balance. I grabbed at the table, though there wasn’t much to hold, and braced my feet on the floor.
The motorhome righted with a jarring bounce.
“What the fuck?” I called back to Randall, turning in my seat to face him from the back.
“That’s the storm, not me,” he yelled over the increasing beating of the rain.
Thunder rumbled, and it seemed to capture inside the motorhome.
The storm grew worse as we crossed into California. We tried to eat and rest, but the wind forced the motorhome from shoulder to shoulder, swerving among sparse traffic with headlights swallowed up the darkness as clouds draped heavier. Rain came down in veils that shifted and moved, revealing only more darkness between them.
Finally, we neared the ocean, but I could only smell it around the rain. The line between water and land no longer existed, and it took me a long moment, as the motorhome came to a halt, to realize the churning darkness was all water.
Waves rushed up on top of each other where Santa Monica beach had been before the Pacific Ocean had swallowed it. The legs of the pier, the forest without roots, had nearly vanished under the water.
The glowing bands of light that were Pacific Park swayed against the dark sky.
“Are you sure he’s here?” I asked, but even as I spoke it, a familiar oozing form rose up out of the water.
Frank the trash monster stretched higher and higher before snapping like a rubber band back under the waves.
“Okay,” I said to the group. “Let’s make this fast. Bhaskar and I will flank Otilia. Sasmita, Randall, hold back and cover us against…All of it. Cover us against all of it.”
I gestured indiscriminately toward outside.
Randall peeled from behind the steering wheel and he nodded once. I started to stand, but he stepped around me, lifted the bench lid, and pulled free his sword and sheath from the Dark Lands.
I squeezed his bicep and then parted from him and led the way to the door.
The door flung open on its own accord and cold rain blew into our faces. I spluttered it off, squinting. A few steps down, the tide churned toward the motorhome, but didn’t reach yet.
“On second thought, move the motorhome and then cover us,” I said. “Much more of this storm and the motorhome will be washed away.”
Sasmita wordlessly took the keys Randall offered her.
I hopped down, landing in the soft sand. Bhaskar and Otilia came down behind me, and I dropped back to flank Otilia on one side as Bhaskar took the other. Together, we trudged toward the water, heading for Santa Monica Pier.
Behind us, the motorhome started up as the others drove it toward safety, out of the reach of the wild ocean.
Water rose up to our calves, and above, rain hammered down until we looked, almost right away, as if we had gone for a swim in the ocean. My wet hair lay flat against the back of my head and sides of my face. My shirt clung to my torso, and my pants hugged my legs in an uncomfortable way that made me want to strip out of them.
As we neared the pier, a layer of darkness rose up against the sky, but it wasn’t Frank this time.
The wave crashed down, flooding water up to our thighs.
We had to half swim, half climb, to reach the top of the pier. Water drained off me as I clomped across the deck, my wet boots sloshing and making strange wet sounds as I headed toward Pacific Park.
“Yuto,” I called into the night.
Rain came down harder, and the waves rolled into enormous mounds that erupted forward, taking more of the land with it.
“We’re going to help you,” I said, but my voice was drowned out by a dark grumble of thunder.
I continued forward, Otilia between Bhaskar and me. She clasped the medallion close to her chest, and I wondered if her shaking was from the storm.
I doubted it.
“Yuto!”
Her voice startled me, but then I held myself back, letting her keep the lead.
Lightning bolts cracked across the sky in quick succession.
A figure stepped out in front of us. Another flash of lightning lit up Yuto’s features. He looked as if he had aged another hundred years in the time we had been gone.
His lips parted as if he meant to say something. His gaze landed on Otilia, and he fell to his knees.
“Otilia Rose.” His voice cracked.
She dropped down, flinging her arms around him. They stood together, on their knees, embracing, their bodies racked with shivers and sobs.
A dark shadow built on the horizon.
Another wave was coming in, and this one was already too big.
I rushed toward Yuto and Otilia.
“Guys, I hate to be that person, but to be that person—we need to get on with it,” I said, gesturing toward the distance. “It’s getting worse.”
“It always does,” Yuto said, tone hopeless. “I cannot make it stop.”
He seemed to want to convince me of it, but I had already been sold a while ago, about the time I went to plunder a tomb on his behalf.
“We’ve found a way,” I said, voice straining over the storm. “We’re going to strip you of your magic.”
I tensed, expecting him to unleash his wrath at such a bold assumption. He was, after all, one of the dark mages.
Instead, he helped Otilia to her feet as he stood.
“Is this true?” he asked. “How is it possible?”
“We’ve found one of Sahir’s medallions,” Otilia said, extending her fist in between them. She unfurled her fingers.
I wanted to snap up the medallion, to protect it, to keep it from the dark mage, but I resisted and held back, noting the wave rolling toward the pier.
We didn’t have time to contemplate anything further. We had made our decision to try to save Yuto with the medallion, and now we would play it out, see how it went.
“All right,” he said on a breath. “If parting from my magic is the only way, then I will do it.”
Otilia’s posture relaxed, and I realized she had feared that Yuto would decline, that her assumptions about him had wrong.
Or that perhaps he had changed, not for the better, during his time away in the portrait.
Without a word, Otilia pressed the medallion to his chest and bowed her head, eyes closed. I could barely make out her features in the darkness and rain.
Thunder rumbled through the sky, vibrating my skin.
The medallion didn’t light up. It didn’t do anything.
The sky darkened, and the wave grew higher.
How could the medallion not take his magic? Was he simply too strong for it? Or were we not using it right? The story had been people touched their hands—or the hands of others—to it and then requested whose magic to steal.
Had we damaged it in the fire?
Or…
Otilia wasn’t earnest. She had loved Yuto’s magic. Even though she had seen the destruction it could do, that it was doing now, she remembered frolics through star fields in her reach. To her, Yuto’s magic was enchanted blooms and birds that sang to her as they fluttered overhead.
He would never be a dark mage to her, no matter how much of the world he destroyed.
I darted forward, grabbing her wrist. Her head snapped up as she glared at me.
“Let go,” I said, prying the medallion from her. “I’ll do it.”
Her body tensed, as if she were ready to fight me for the right to the medallion—or Yuto’s right to his magic. Then, as if remembering the situation at hand, she dropped the medallion into my palm and inched backwards, each step more painful than the last.
The pier creaked as water rose up underneath it, pressing from the bottom, ripping the forest without roots from the ground. The deck swayed a little under us. The Ferris wheel rocked side to side.
I slammed the medallion against Yuto, trapping it between my hand and his chest.
“Take his goddamned magic, you piece of shit,” I snarled.
The medallion flared white. I was thrown backwards, slamming into the side of a building. My arm fell to my side, my hand releasing metal fragments that scattered along the deck. Pushing through the thrumming agony welling in me like the ocean, I scrabbled with my fingers for several pieces of metal and held them up to the pulsing magical light filling the air.
The medallion had shattered.
A few yards ahead, Yuto stood, white magic swirling around him, as he pulled more and more from the earth. The ground under the water shook.
I started to push to my feet. The wave rushed in, slamming down at the end of the pier. Water welled up, ripping the pier to the side. Pacific Park teetered, undecided.
Saltwater flooded up to my chest and kept coming. I spit as I swam toward shore, a line that kept extending farther and farther away. As my feet touched wet ground, I pulled myself from the waves and stumbled forward. Otilia and Bhaskar trudged out next to me, waterlogged and gasping for air.
We stood just out of reach of the tide, for now, and turned back to the pier as waves rose up and slammed down. Yuto, wrapped in brilliant white light that contrasted against the darkness of the ocean and storm, lifted up, hovering above the water as it ripped at the pier.
He drifted toward us, and I found myself taking a step backwards…and then another. My heart rammed into my chest bone, over and over, beating a tune of what the fuck did you do?
How could I have tried to save a dark mage? How had I bought into their love story and believed giving him a chance outside of the portrait was a good idea?
He hadn’t just destroyed a single town. His storm had taken over four states.
Now, whether he meant to or not, he was going to kill us.
As he approached, the pier lifted up with a mighty groan. The Ferris wheel tipped. Sparks flared skyward as the wheel toppled over with a thud and a crash that vibrated in the night. The entire pier tipped over after it. All of Santa Monica Pier sank below the surface of the water, inch by inch, as the next wave moved in.
We retreated farther, but I could not take my eyes off Yuto floating toward us, a display of his limitless power.
As he sank toward the ground in front of us, I brought up my magic.
It was a foolish move. I wouldn’t be able to even reach him; he would halt me in my step with little more than a thought.
“Yuto,” I said.
He turned toward me, his features nearly obscured by the glowing white wisps that curled off him.
“You can’t do this,” I said, even though I had no idea what I thought I was doing. Yuto may be entirely gone as far as we knew, the magic taking over. Or maybe he had been unsavable this whole time. “You’ve destroyed more than the other mages combined.”
His feet touched the ground.
“You promised,” I continued. “You said you wanted Otilia to know you loved her, that you still do—and that you were safe despite the prison.”
The white glow around him subsided until it was an outline around his dark silhouette.
“She’s here,” I said. “I kept my end of the deal.”
His head stiffly turned toward where she stood in the cold and wet, shuddering, tears long imprisoned freed to flow down her cheeks.
“Don’t make her go through this,” I said, as softly as I could around the unrelenting storm. “Don’t make her watch you become the monster they called you. Don’t let them be right.”
Under the storm, silence reached between us, a strange kind, filled with half-formed thoughts left unspoken.
Yuto—the one Otilia had loved so dearly, and still did—finally surfaced.
“She’s right,” he said, his voice gentle as he turned to Otilia. “I cannot be stopped. You’ve seen for yourself.”
“No,” she whispered, and took a step toward him, trembling. “Yuto, no.”
Scraping noises came from behind me as Sasmita and Randall lugged Yuto’s portrait toward us, through the water and rain.
They propped it up a few yards away. I retreated toward them, and with each wet sloshing step, my heart sank.
I knew what had to be done.
Fighting back tears of frustration, of disappointment, of injustice, I reached into my pocket and retrieved the first of Sahir’s medallions—the one that opened portals.
My arm moved slow and heavy as I pressed the medallion to Yuto Takahashi’s portrait. The blue light flared in the darkness, and the code began to spin up.
One by one, the locks fell into place.
Red light exploded from the portrait, and when it cleared, the painting stood with a red glowing outline.
“They weren’t right in how they treated you, how they treated us,” Yuto said to Otilia. “What t
hey asked of you was unbearably cruel. We know the truth, though, my love. We know the day I conjured stars for you, I leveled a forest. The day I enchanted blooms, I flooded a village. My magic was never balanced, and never under control.”
She sobbed harder. He went to her then and took her hand.
“Our hearts would destroy the world to be together, but our minds know there would be no world left.” He pressed a kiss to her fingers. “I am so flawed, but my love for you remains perfect.”
He released her and strode toward the portrait.
Otilia whimpered his name, dropping to the ground. My heart ached, and I wanted to go to her, but not yet. I had to see this through the end.
As Yuto approached, my breath caught.
He was truly the most powerful dark mage I had witnessed yet. His magic was unlike any other and beholding it made me doubt everything—who I was, what I could do, and the reality of the world. How could so much power exist in one man? How could it be that he couldn’t control it?
He stopped in front of the portrait, his gaze on me. “Thank you for letting us have this moment.”
Otilia hunched over sobbing in the wet sand, no longer the once greatest huntress but a deeply wounded woman. I wasn’t so sure she agreed with his sentiment, but I wasn’t about to argue. He needed to get inside the portrait.
I nodded once, rooted to my spot.
My heart hammered harder than the rain. If Yuto changed his mind about returning to his prison, I was not going to be able to force him. I had let my chance to ambush him go.
I wouldn’t be making that mistake again.
From nearby, a silhouette darted toward him. He spun toward it, erupting white magic from his hands. The silhouette threw up a shield and in the same moment, it shattered. Shards of the shield flung in every direction. Lightning flashed over the obscured form at the same time I realized Sasmita was making her move. She had taken off the vial and clutched it in her fist.
Yuto curved his hand out from his chest, unleashing a firestorm of white glowing death.