half-lich 02 - void weaver

by martinez, katerina

  “Take them down,” she said, and the horde of spirits began to rush at the legionnaires who, without their magic, weren’t able to match the speed and strength of the spirits bearing down on them.

  One legionnaire was picked up by his jacket, lifted off the ground, and dropped like a stone several feet away. Another was run down by a man wreathed in ethereal, green flame and chased down the hill and across the road on the other side of the mausoleum. But it was Logan who received the most attention from the horde of spirits. Alice made sure of that.

  They came at him hard and fast, swiping and cutting and throwing ghostly fire in his direction. But even without magic, Logan was a force to be reckoned with. His instincts were sharp, his body able to quickly shift position to avoid being hurt. In many ways, he was like fire himself. It was almost like watching a dance—a dance of flame—but then the flame started getting too close. Alice broke her concentration and threw her senses back into her own body just as Logan came at her, his brick of a fist cocked and ready to strike.

  She ducked, weaved out of harm’s way, and made a mad dash toward the mausoleum, stopping just short of where Isaac, Cameron, and Jim were standing. Isaac’s bangle and Jim’s rings were glowing blue, while Cameron’s eyes and the amulet around his neck shone the color of molten gold. The wards were gone, and as Alice stared at the three waiting men, she got the impression there were three almost invisible figures standing directly behind each of them.

  “It’s over,” Isaac said, “You’re beaten.”

  Logan scowled, and then with a quick upward gesture of his hands caused a line of fire to rise from out of the ground, cutting Alice off before she could reach Isaac. The flames weren’t orange, she saw—they were red, the color of his eyes, and they burned brighter and hotter than any flame she had ever gotten close to.

  Alice put her hands in front of her face and backpedaled right into Logan’s chest. He grabbed her by the hair and tugged, forcing her to look up to the night sky. “Now I’ve got you,” he said into her ear, “And you’re gonna pay for what you did to me.”

  She was about to reply when she felt a powerful current of vibrations run through her. It was as if the graveyard had taken a huge, deep breath. The feeling paralyzed her, and it paralyzed the rest of the mages too. Logan blinked, astonished at what he was feeling. Isaac, Jim, and Cameron looked around, knowing full well what was happening but somehow surprised to be feeling it too.

  Then the graveyard exhaled. A loud boom ripped through the silence followed by a powerful gust of wind. Logan released her again and she went sprawling to the wet earth, her hands splayed out in front of her. Alice’s heart was beating hard in her chest, in her neck, in the palms of her hands. She knew what was coming—what had just come.

  The magistrate had made their entrance.

  Around her, the mages were getting up.

  “Three guesses as to who that is,” Isaac said to Logan.

  Logan glared at Isaac. “I’m glad they’re here,” he said, “I was going to take you and the little bitch to them anyway.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Alice wanted to stand, but she couldn’t. It was as if dead hands had reached up from out of the soil and rooted her to the spot. Isaac, Jim, and Cameron came up to her and knelt beside her.

  “Are you alright?” Isaac asked.

  “I think so,” she said, slowly rising to her feet. Her stomach was twisting painfully in her gut, and her scarred back was throbbing. Whatever energy she had before now, she had used. She could feel it returning, slowly, barely a trickle, but her body was telling her she was hungry, and she would be a fool not to acknowledge it.

  “C’mon,” Cameron said, helping her up.

  “What if they take his side?” Alice asked.

  “They won’t,” Isaac said.

  The clearing was a lot fuller now than it had been a moment ago. There were five legionnaires here before, plus Cameron and Jim. There had also been spirits zipping around, screeching, clawing, and assailing, but they had disappeared. Maybe Alice’s power had worn out, or maybe they had been dismissed by more powerful magic. Now there were easily double as many people standing in the clearing now, four of which were wearing black robes and hoods that obscured their faces.

  The entire scene was like something out of a black mass.

  “Praetors,” Logan said as he approached the new arrivals, barging past Cameron to get to them. “I have the fugitive, Moreau, and the woman he was hiding.”

  The praetors didn’t reply—instead they looked at him from beneath their dark cowls. These were imposing people, not your run of the mill figure of authority. They weren’t just powerful in their own right—they governed mages; people already capable of some great feats of supernatural might. She knew them as the Shadow Council, and understood they were the brains behind every contract she had ever received from the government of mages; and they paid well.

  “This is the woman he was hiding,” Logan said, whipping his arm around to point at Alice. “This is the threat I have been rooting out.”

  “Alice Werner,” said a booming, deep voice from a source Alice couldn’t identify. The sky grumbled almost as if in response to the sound. “Come forward.”

  One of the praetors had spoken, but Alice couldn’t determine who.

  “Praetors,” Isaac said, “Please allow me a moment to explain.”

  “Silence, Tribune,” said one of the male praetors. “You’re in enough trouble as it is. Escaping custody is a grievous offence.”

  “So is allowing someone in your custody to be assaulted and battered by an animal.”

  “Logan acted against the magistrate’s wishes.”

  “In that case, I want to see him chastised. Right now. According to the Magus Codice, tribunes are sacrosanct, and attacking one is an offence that requires punishment to the highest degree.”

  “That will come later.”

  “Unacceptable.”

  “What’s unacceptable,” Logan said, interrupting, “Is that you hid a dangerous threat to our kind and endangered our society.”

  “I told you about the threat, but you chose not to believe me.”

  “What, Nyx? No, Moreau; that’s a fiction you conjured up to protect the real threat, which is standing right in front of us right now. We all saw what she did, and in an area protected by wards no less.”

  “Me?” Alice asked. “If I wanted to hurt your kind I would, but I don’t because I’m not an asshole.”

  “So you admit it?”

  “Admit what?”

  “That you could hurt us.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Isaac said, directing himself to the praetors. “Your legionnaires are out of control. They attacked me, then they attacked Cameron at his sanctuary, they kidnapped him, and they threatened to kill him. Is this how legionnaires are meant to behave? Is this how we as a society behave? Is this what we have become?”

  “It is unacceptable,” said one of the praetors.

  Logan scowled. “I did this all to protect you!” he said, “I broke the rules none of you had the balls to break because I know there’s something going on here, something big, something you refused to see. And I’m going to root it out because that’s my job, and I’m damn good at my job.” He turned and bore his red eyes not at Alice, but into her. In that moment he looked less like a man, and more like some unknowable thing with glowing red eyes. “You and your magic are a threat. I sensed it back at the sanctuary and I sense it now.”

  “Sensed… at the sanctuary?” Alice asked, “I didn’t do magic back at the sanctuary.”

  Isaac looked like he was processing something, then his eyes lit up with alarm. “What did you sense?” he asked.

  “What? I’m not talking to you, Moreau, I’m talking to her.” Logan said.

  Isaac squared up to Logan, grabbed him by the collar, and said, “What did you sense!”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “It was cold, dark magic. Magic she used.”


  “She got on a bike and left the area because she didn’t want you to kidnap her too, remember? If she had any magic to use against you, don’t you think she would have stood and fought? I know her well enough that she wouldn’t let herself be pushed around by the likes of you, even if she was outnumbered.”

  “Then if she didn’t do it, who did?” He turned to his legionnaires—one of them, the one that had run when the Pain Children came, was still missing. “Was it you?” They looked at each other and shook their heads almost in unison. “Of course it wasn’t,” Logan said, “Because I know my legionnaires; we’re cut from the same cloth.”

  “I’m telling you, she had nothing to do with what you sensed.”

  Not for the first time tonight, Alice’s skin began to crawl. Only this time it wasn’t as if she had been brushed by an invisible, cold hand—she felt like she was standing in a walk-in freezer, naked, and completely exposed to the cold. The feeling was so intense it caused her to shudder uncontrollably, every muscle in her body twitching in a wave starting at the crown of her head and ending in her thighs.

  For a moment the world around her seemed to slow. She could hear her heart thumping in her head, but could hear nothing else. Her back felt like it was on fire, and her skin felt as though she had been dipped in ice. She didn’t know whether she was hot or cold, but when she heard the haunting aria ringing in the back of her mind she understood one thing with all the clarity of the world; something dark was coming.

  On the back of a dark dirge she comes, she thought, singing her siren song.

  “We have to get out of here,” Alice said, but no one was listening to her.

  Logan and Isaac continued to argue about what Logan had sensed and how he had been able to sense it. Isaac hadn’t told anyone about his new powers and he wouldn’t, not any time soon, but he wanted to try and figure out how Logan had been able to feel the magic he and Alice had both identified as Void magic. Had it been one of his legionnaires who had used Void magic and not told him, or was it that he had used it himself? In which case, he was lying now—and was more dangerous than ever. But Alice knew this wasn’t the case. She would have felt the touch of the Void on him like she had on Isaac, but Logan hadn’t triggered her sense.

  In the end, it was Cameron who took Alice by the elbow and brought her back into the moment. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “We have to go, Cameron—she’s been watching us. She knows we’re here… and she’s coming.”

  “Coming? Now?”

  “Yes!” Alice turned her head. “Isaac!” Isaac stopped arguing with Logan and craned his head to look at her. Materializing directly behind his head, from out of the shadows themselves, came a large, black shadow entity with a wide mouth filled with sharp, copper teeth. Pain Children. “Get down!” Alice screamed.

  Isaac ducked and the shadow creature’s open mouth flew wide of Isaac’s head by only a couple of inches.

  “Christ!” Isaac said, rushing to get to his feet. “Protect yourselves, all of you—and for God’s sake, don’t let them touch you with magic!”

  Bubbles of prismatic light were starting to form all around Alice. Some were blue, others violet, others were white and red and orange. The Pain Children came howling out of the night like the nightmares that they were, and when they struck these shields, they hissed and drew back. But they weren’t all trying to attack shields—some were headed toward Alice. One of them in particular, Alice, and even Cameron, recognized instantly.

  The old man poltergeist hurled itself across the clearing, bounding and striding at an impossible speed. With its white hair, yellow teeth, and skin stretched over its bones, it looked every bit like a corpse that had picked itself out of a grave and come to join the party. Cameron went to push Alice out of the way, to stop it from hitting her, but she pushed Cameron back, turned to look at the poltergeist, and put out her hand.

  Her palm started to glow. She drew her power out of herself and directed it toward the poltergeist, delivering it by saying the word “Stop.” When her power struck, the poltergeist came to a slow halt. It lost its sneer, its stride, and seemed to not understand what it was doing. It cocked its head at Alice. She looked at Cameron, then back at the poltergeist, and said “Attack your brothers.”

  The poltergeist regarded her curiously, then turned, and went back into the fight—only this time it wasn’t attacking bubbles of protection; it was leaping toward other Pain Children that had started to materialize.

  “There are so many of them,” she said. “Too many.”

  “We can do this,” Cameron said, “We just have to drive them away, and then you can do whatever you just did on more of them.”

  “No… that won’t work. They obey Nyx, and Nyx is close. I need to draw her out and end her.” She looked at him. “You can’t be here when she comes. You need to protect yourself.”

  “What? No.”

  “If she comes and she touches you with her magic, you’ll die. You need to protect yourself, Cameron. Put yourself in one of those bubbles.”

  “I’m not leaving you to fight on your own!”

  “You did this for me once,” she said, “Now let me do it for you. Please.”

  Cameron clenched his jaw tightly, then he gripped the amulet around his neck, took a step away from Alice, and surrounded himself in a beautiful, glimmering shield of gold and green energy that made her think of fresh, wild forests filled with big jungle cats. “I’m not leaving,” he said, “I’m going to be right here.”

  “Whatever you do, promise me you won’t try to help me.”

  A strange feeling of déjà vu filled her then, but she ignored it. Cameron didn’t say anything, and Alice took his silence as agreement. She sped back into the fray, ducking beneath howling specters and twirling around psychotic shades, all the while drawing as much of her own power into her chest as she could. When she felt like a bubble about to burst, she expelled it in all directions and allowed herself to become a beacon of Void energy.

  One by one the creatures converged on where she was, drawn to her like sharks to the smell of blood. The mass of airborne Pain Children blotted the moon and the stars so that all was dark. Alice looked up at them, preparing herself for what was to come, but they didn’t lunge toward her like kamikaze dive bombers. Instead they hovered, waiting, and Alice knew immediately why.

  “Hello, Alice.”

  She spun on her heel and saw a woman standing there; beautiful, pale-skinned, and young—barely into her twenties. An angry heat rose into Alice’s throat at the thought that Nyx had stolen another young life, but she kept herself under control. “Nyx,” Alice said.

  “I see you’ve learned a couple of tricks.”

  “I would say I’ve learned more than a couple.”

  “Don’t you think it’s time you gave back what you took from me? Don’t you want to end this?”

  “I do,” Alice said, “More than anything.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Transferrence

  One day, she thought—maybe one day soon—Alice’s propensity to leap into something without thinking would get her killed. But she didn’t think today would be that day. Nyx’s young, slender body shifted to a side-stance. Her hands and arms crackled with the dark power of the Void, and now Alice’s did too. She was drawing on the necromantic energy of the graveyard, using whatever she could find to fuel her own magic, and it was working.

  In her periphery, Alice noticed how the praetors were moving closer to the dueling ring Nyx’s Pain Children were creating by hovering in a circle as they were. Some of these floating specters shot down to attack the praetors, but the mages had gotten confident. Arcs of prismatic magic flew into the cloud of swirling, howling creatures, forcing some of them to withdraw. The Pain Children that were unable to fly created a tighter circle around Alice and Nyx, though they too were under attack—and by one of their own. The poltergeist was still under Alice’s control, and it was fighting its brothers with furious zeal.

&nbs
p; However, none of them would be able to approach. Alice couldn’t see the protective wards Nyx had willed into existence, but she felt them. They were like invisible walls defining the perimeter their engagement would be confined to. As long as the wards were up, it was only Alice and Nyx, one on one, with no one to intervene.

  Nyx made a sudden move and this stole Alice’s attention again. A whip of purple and black light came slicing through the air at Alice, but she put her hands up to protect herself and the whip seemed to strike an invisible barrier creating a buckshot blast of sound that echoed throughout the graveyard.

  Alice looked at her hands, and then at Nyx.

  “Impressive,” Nyx said, “But it isn’t enough.”

  Another whip of dark light raced through the air. This time, instead of blocking it, Alice quickly spun on the spot, put her hand out, and grabbed the end of the whip as it came to strike her. The whip was cold and hot at the same time, and it bit into her palm like a razor blade, but she wrapped her hand around it and pulled, and Nyx staggered a couple of steps before releasing the phantom weapon she had conjured.

  Alice opened her hand and let the whip fall to the earth where it dissolved. Her hand was bleeding, but wreathed in shifting light. Before her very eyes, she watched the wound knit together and close, leaving only a slightly visible scar—like the ones on my back, she thought. Again she turned her eyes toward Nyx, this time grinning.

  Think like a mage, Isaac had said. This wasn’t an easy feat and one that still required her to close her eyes and concentrate on what she wanted to occur, but the thought itself came quickly. When she opened her eyes they were shining bright and blue. Nyx cocked her head, regarding Alice curiously, and Alice opened herself to the place where her magic came from.

  She thought of Trapper. Alice blinked, and in blinking created a blue flash of light as bright as a thunderbolt. All around her, the Pain Children howled and screamed. Nyx covered her face with her hands, but she too had been hurt by the flash. Alice blinked again and the cloud of Pain Children dispersed. Nyx threw her head back and let out a piercing scream as the skin on her arm turned black and began to split and crackle like meat on a grill.