‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve come to heal you.’
Harrow blinked at her. ‘That’s called burning, Hella.’ He held his tail gingerly, now blackened.
‘Not that,’ Hella snapped. ‘Your soul is missing. I have to try it. Come here. I can heal it back.’ She reached out for him again, through the bars.
Harrow’s slit-blue eyes popped. He let out a bark of laughter. ‘You know, I never even thought of that.’
‘No one did,’ Hella said with a smirk. ‘Come here.’ She closed and opened her fingers, beckoning him.
‘Did you come here alone?’ Harrow asked, not moving.
‘No. Tommy got me in. He’s still looking for you, I guess. There are a lot of cells down here.’
Harrow nodded slowly. ‘He came for me too?’
Hella nodded, then clicked her fingers impatiently. ‘Harrow, come on. We have to try this, before we get caught.’
He didn’t move from his crouched position on the uncomfortable-looking bed. ‘You know, pretty witch,’ he said slowly, ‘you healing me is the reason I’m like this. You’re the reason I’m in here. Cuffed, locked up.’ He raised his hands so that she could clearly see the cuffs and the rings of cuts. ‘The fire to my ice. Hmmm. I should have known to stay away from you. Perhaps we are natural enemies. I ought not to trust you.’ His tail twitched then, as if in pain, and Hella recoiled as if struck.
Hella’s jaw clenched. Her heart ached. She banged her palm against the bars of his cell. ‘You tried to murder me!’ she yelled. ‘If anyone should be distrustful, it’s me of you. I still came here to help you, you ungrateful, brooding warlock.’ She banged the cell again, wishing she could shove him. Then she smiled, and briefly closed her eyes, focusing her chakras.
‘Hella?’ Harrow said. ‘What are you—’
She opened her eyes, and, with her telekinesis, shoved him into the corner of his cell with her full force, letting her anger drip from her powers. He yelped in surprise, then again in pain as his back struck the bars of the corner. She watched him get awkwardly to his feet, his hands bound. She was shaking now, her emotions spilling over. She had been absolutely petrified when he had attacked her, truly and terribly afraid that she would die. Hella could still feel his hands around her throat, and the trust that she had placed in him, the nice moments they had shared—the kissing, the touching, even just the talking—shattered into a thousand pieces as she had struggled to breathe. She had felt that if only he would have mercy on her, she would be okay. He had squeezed her throat, choked her. He’d tried to freeze her alive.
Now, she was not okay. And maybe he should feel that too.
Hella flung Harrow bodily around his cell, and he began to yell at her. She heard a bone crack. He stumbled, trying to get to his feet, and she flung him again. Her eyes welled with tears. She had wanted so desperately to help him, despite the trust he had broken—leaving a physical pain buried deep in her chest—and he wouldn’t even come toward her to let her heal him. She watched as he stumbled again, dark blue blood dripping from his nose.
He was breathing hard. ‘Hella! Stop!’ he called.
She paused, leaving him floating in the middle of his plastic prison.
‘Why?’ Hella asked, stepping forward. ‘Do you trust me now? Do you trust me to stop? I would have trusted you, if you’d stopped.’
Something changed in Harrow’s face. The blue of his eyes looked more like the deep ocean she knew. ‘Yes, okay?’ His voice was softer now. ‘I trust you to stop. Just, stop. Please.’ Dark-blue blood dripped out of him as he spoke.
It was the please that got her. She let him go, lowering him to the ground. He landed lightly on his feet, then winced at his injuries. The way he hunched to his left made her think he had broken a rib or two. She was glad. She couldn’t open her mouth to say a word to him. She didn’t know why she had bothered to come here. Hella couldn’t tell anymore, if she wanted to break another rib, to punish him for the pain he had caused her, or if she wanted to burn these bars to the ground and walk through the fire to embrace him.
After a chilling moment, as those slit-blue eyes looked at her and she realised he was breathing hard, through the pain, she decided to do neither of those things. Instead, she spoke past the swelling agony rising in her chest. ‘Come here,’ she said, softly this time. ‘So I can heal you.’
Without hesitation, he came as close as the bars would allow. His nose was bleeding. There were cuts on his face and his arms. He clutched at his ribs. He limped a little. She stared at him, at the damage she had done, and ached for him. Compared to what he had done to her, it was nothing.
It was not enough. She wanted him to feel what she’d felt. It was not enough.
And it was all too much.
Hella could not bear to see him hurt. She reached a hand through the bars, and he took it. He was shimmered, his icy magic always made his skin cool. She closed her eyes, focusing her chakras. Her breathing slowed. As she opened her eyes, she saw him flinch back—then remembered how he had been healed by Amara, the crackling of colliding magic. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, holding a little tighter. Her healing would not harm him. That was one of the blessings of being a witch, their magic did not collide like warlocks’ magic did.
Her hand glowed purple and he sighed, as if in relief. She concentrated on finding his wounds with her powers, noting every one of them. She felt the cracked cartilage in his nose heal, the cuts close, the two broken ribs repair themselves, and the gash in his knee sewed up. He stood a little easier, without hunching, and rested easier on his leg. A pang of guilt stabbed through her, but she ignored it. Hella held onto him, focusing, trying to bring his soul back. She poured her pain and her hopes into her powers.
She was the promised witch, her gifts unknown and untrained. She was determined to right this wrong, so that everything would return to how it was before. Hella was desperate to find her new ‘normal’. With Harrow. Hella looked into his eyes and saw her emotions mirrored. She dug deeper, into her own soul, searching for a way. Her hand shook over his, vibrating with energy. He began to shake too, then seemed to try to pull away. She looked up at him, and gasped.
His eyes were pits of darkness, completely black. ‘Hella, stop,’ he said, his voice ragged. But she knew she couldn’t be hurting him. She held on, digging deeper. Perhaps he was afraid of his soul coming back. She must be able to do this. If she tried hard enough, she could force it back to him.
His blue-tipped claws scratched out at her. ‘Hella, don’t. Something’s wrong. Stop.’ He was just worried about getting it back.
‘I have to try,’ she said. She felt her eyes glaze purple with fire.
Tommy finally found them and halted in his tracks. ‘Hella? Is it working?’
‘Tommy, stop her!’ Harrow called, his eyes still black.
‘I… Harrow, she’s healing you.’ He stepped a little further into the room, then glanced at Hella. ‘Woah,’ he said, taking a shocked step backward.
Harrow’s claws raked up and down Hella’s arms, slashing at her until her shirt was ribboned. ‘Harrow, stop that,’ Tommy said with reproach. Hella suspected that, if she were not on fire, Tommy would try to tend to her arms. His first-aid training was never far from his mind.
‘Tommy, help me,’ Harrow panted.
Tommy frowned. ‘She’s helping you, Harrow. Don’t worry.’
Hella dug deeper into her powers than she knew she could, as if digging into a well that turned out to be connected to the ocean. The flood of her magic poured through her hands in a torrent. Everything around her burst into shades of purple. This has to work. The room disappeared, as well as Tommy and Harrow. She felt a slight pain along her arms, Harrow’s scratch marks, but her focus was unbreakable. The stone floor beneath her feet began to tremble, and she wondered what Tommy was doing. His Terra powers were not needed right now.
Then a scream shattered everything, and she was falling backward. The room reappeared as i
t had been, and she hit the ground, hard, knocking the breath out of her. From the ground, she blinked up at the boys. ‘What happened?’ Hella scrambled to her feet, up to the bars of the cage, then froze. The front row of plastic bars was partially melted, almost like stalactites and stalagmites.
Tommy was on the ground to her left, thrown up against a wall, nursing a bloody head-wound, and Harrow was curled up in a ball on the floor of his cage. He was whimpering. Hella reached out to him. ‘Harrow, are you okay?’ She glanced to Tommy. ‘What happened? Why did you make the ground tremble?’
Tommy got to his feet, wincing at his wounded head. ‘That wasn’t me, Hella. That was you.’ He went to his knees by Harrow’s cage, shimmered, and reached out a green-tipped claw. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Harrow.’ To her surprise, Harrow’s shimmered blue-tipped claw reached out and grasped Tommy’s.
Harrow’s pale face was streaked with tears. ‘What the hell did you do that for?’ he asked her, his voice breaking. He might look like a terrified teenager, but his voice was hard and angry. He could barely look at her. His eyes were slit-blue again, the black was gone.
‘I… I was healing you,’ Hella said. ‘Did it work?’
Tommy rubbed the back of his head ruefully. ‘Hella, that wasn’t healing, that was like—’ He paused, his right hand still clasped with Harrow’s. ‘Like a lightning strike. Whatever strength you drew on, to heal him, was way, way too much.’
She noticed that Harrow was shaking. Tommy held tight to him. The warlocks had not always seen eye to eye, but now they clutched each other like brothers. There was something about the similarity of their claws, the comfort of another of your species that Harrow needed right now, she could see.
‘You nearly killed both of us,’ Tommy said, without looking at her.
Hella shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, shocked. ‘I was healing him. Look, he had injuries before, now they’re gone.’ She reached out for Harrow, and he broke the connection with his fellow warlock and scrambled furiously back to the end of his cage. Fresh tears spilled down his cheeks. She had never imagined seeing Harrow, filled with snark and bravado, cry before. Let alone soulless Harrow. It made something crack inside her.
‘Never do that again,’ Harrow whispered. He looked at Tommy. ‘Keep her away from me,’ he breathed, pain raw in his voice. ‘Please. Keep her away.’ He brought his knees up to his chest and lay his head on his knees. Black hair covered his face, and he began rocking back and forth, quietly crying.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Hella
Tommy gave Harrow a look brimming with sympathy. If there were not bars—Hella’s spell had only randomly melted parts, not enough to get in—in the way, she expected he would go and sit with Harrow and put a comforting hand on his back.
Hella stood frozen. Tommy grabbed her hand and hauled her out of the basement cell. ‘We have to go. The guards will be swarming down here. I’m sure everyone in the building felt that, Hella.’ He pulled her along, and she barely heard him. For the first time she could remember, he sounded angry with her.
Please. Please keep her away. Harrow’s words echoed in her head. He was terrified of her. There was a strange feeling of shame, that something she had done had made Harrow so scared.
What had she done? Tommy pulled her this way and that, without her really seeing anything. Before she knew it, they were bursting out of a back-entrance she hadn’t known about, careening out onto the side of the building facing a tree-dense patch of woodland. Tommy continued pulling her along, talking to her, but she couldn’t hear him. All she could hear was Harrow. Please. Please keep her away. The fear in his voice broke her heart. What had she done?
Everything swam before her until she was jolted back to reality. Her back was slammed up against the rough bark of a tree, and Tommy Terra was growling at her, his usual polite attitude long gone. ‘Hella! Are you listening to me? What the hell were you doing? You nearly killed us. I thought you were going to heal him.’ He shook her shoulders roughly.
Hella burst into tears. ‘I was trying to heal him.’ She sobbed. ‘I was trying harder than I have ever tried before.’ Hella’s voice rose with panic. ‘I never meant to hurt him. I mean, I got angry with him, but my healing—’ She broke off with a cry. ‘My healing has never hurt anyone. I didn’t mean to, I swear, Tommy, you have to believe me.’ She realised she was clutching his sleeves, staring up into his usually soft grass-green eyes now hard as emeralds.
‘Hella,’ Tommy said, his voice firm. They were in the middle of the backwoods by the north side of Warlock House, the edge of Mill Valley. The woods were only visited by birds and small wildlife; usually kangaroos and a wombat or two. No one was chasing them. They were in the clear, at least in that regard. ‘You have no idea how powerful you are, do you, witch?’ He said the word ‘witch’ like a curse, for the first time. It was so out of character she just stared up at him blankly. She wanted the normal Tommy back.
And her normal Harrow.
How had everything gotten so messed up?
‘I didn’t mean to. I just wanted so badly to heal him, to get it back.’ Tears poured down her cheeks. She let go of Tommy and slid to the bottom of the tree and sat in the tangle of roots. Suddenly, she wished he would just leave her there. It seemed a whole other place, alone in the forest. Perhaps here, she would not hurt anyone. In the distance, she could hear birds singing quietly. Even with him here—or, perhaps because of this angry Tommy—she felt alone.
He knelt down to her, his face impassive. ‘Did you hurt Harrow, before that? You said he was injured.’
Without looking at him, she nodded. ‘He wouldn’t come to me. To let me heal him. After what he did to me, he didn’t trust me. I got angry.’ She knotted her hands together in her lap. She wanted to bury herself in a book and a big hooded jumper. Hella wondered if there was such a thing as an invisibility spell. She just wanted to disappear.
‘What did you do?’ Tommy said.
‘I threw him around the cell a bit. Telekinetically,’ she admitted, feeling awful.
‘And then he let you heal him?’
‘He trusted me. He knew I would stop,’ she said quietly.
‘Maybe he shouldn’t have.’
Hella’s head snapped up. Her hair had come out of her braids. Red curls fell loose around her face, blocking Tommy partially from view. ‘I tried to heal him.’
‘Hella, you sent about a lightning-bolt’s worth of energy down on him. I was just in the same room as you and it scared the hell out of me. Look at my head.’ He turned to let her see the dark and bloody gash at the nape of his neck, green blood trickled through his orange hair. ‘This’—he pointed at his head—‘is excruciating. I cannot imagine how Harrow felt, how he feels now. You’re lucky he’s not dead.’
Hella reached out for him, to heal him, but even Tommy flinched back from her. ‘Don’t,’ he said sharply. ‘I think we need to figure out a way to control your powers.’ The way he looked down at her then made Hella think of her father—her not-real-father, Finn—with that same contempt of her magic.
Her eyes burned. ‘Don’t lock me up,’ she said, but Tommy was already shaking his head. Over his shoulder, she could see the sun beginning to set. It was an odd view, to see the light fading to pink-orange behind the trees.
‘I won’t. But I can’t say the same for The Force. They’ll have felt that, Hella. They measure magic through electromagnetic field waves. They’ll come to investigate. We can’t let them find you.’
‘Will Harrow tell them?’ She pictured him in his cell, his black eyes, asking her to stop. Why hadn’t she stopped? She could tell he was afraid, but she hadn’t known why. It had made her angry, before, to think that he could be afraid of her, after what he had done.
Now, she was no better than him. There was no malice behind her attack, she supposed. If that made a difference. Hella thought of him, curled up in a ball. She had never seen him cry before. It didn’t make a differe
nce to him, she thought, her heart cracking in her chest.
Tommy shook his head, then winced at his wound. ‘I don’t know if he would. I hope not.’
‘Please let me heal you. I can do it.’ Her voice was soft and small. She raised her hand tentatively, as if to a shy animal.
Tommy hesitated. With good reason. ‘If you do that power-wave-lightning thing, I will never trust you again, you hear me?’
They were alone in the forest on the edge of Mill Valley. There were no shouting voices giving chase, or any outward sign of panic or disorder to whatever they suspected had rocked Warlock House from the basement. Hella hoped they didn’t blame Harrow, though he didn’t have the power.
Tommy looked at her, his grass-green eyes wary. He turned and sat down on the tree-root bumpy ground, his back to her. The gash in the back of his head was deep and bloody.
Hella took several deep breaths, wanting to only access a fraction of her powers, determined to prove that whatever had happened back there was a one-off. An accident. She was not out of control. She sat up on her knees and put a steadying hand on Tommy’s back. She felt his muscles tighten, but he did not move. She used her right hand to use her magic, conjuring just a small amount of power. She would rather heal him slowly than lightning-strike him. He was patient and sat still.
The nails on her right hand flickered with purple flames. After a moment, she let out just a little more and it danced along her fingers. That’s enough. She leant forward, and Tommy felt her movement. His shoulders were coiled wires. He might not flinch from her, but he was afraid. She put her hand to his head and slowly, carefully, healed him. It took a little longer than normal—then again, what was normal? After a few moments, he seemed to relax, just a fraction. And then he was healed. He exhaled and spun around.
He gave her a tight smile. ‘That was good. Thank you.’
Hella doused her magic entirely, then sat back. She sighed with relief. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said quietly, ignoring the fact that it was her who had injured him.
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