The Wind Between Worlds

by Julie Hutchings

I wanted release.

  It was becoming too much for me to watch the Poisons use their powers when I wouldn’t. They shouldn’t have been, either. They knew how it weakened the Elementals, but they were too selfish to care. I couldn’t do that to my mom. Maybe if they were more considerate, their moms wouldn’t be so quick to smack and berate them.

  I was instantly disgusted with myself for the thought. It was an ugly mask for the jealousy I felt that they were so free, so defiant, when the tight wrapper I kept on my magic ate away at me. How stupid to have power I couldn’t even use. Resentment and possibility raged inside me.

  “Screw it.”

  I closed my eyes, and willed the night sky to appear behind them. My mind filled with blazing stars, and I plucked the one that shone the brightest, the one that wanted most to be used. Can my mom feel this steal her energy already?

  When I opened my eyes, the tiny star was in my palm, throbbing in time with the electric energy of the air around it. I smiled at its potential. So much desire wrapped up in this itty bitty silver beauty.

  I didn’t even have to say the words, but I wanted to. I wanted to hear my own voice making magic happen for the first time in years. “I Wish the demon boy was right here.” I crushed the star in my hands, the dust floating up into the air, trying to go back to where it came from. But there was no going back now for either of us.

  Then he appeared through its haze.

  He stood on the landing below me, head hung, seeing someplace else that had nothing to do with me or Rocky Nook High. His suit jacket was gone, his white sleeves rolled up to the elbow, black tie loosened, but still tight. I could see only the top of his tar-colored hair, the franticness of it, the long spikes hanging down over his face. His shoulders heaved like a panting wolf’s.

  “Spells create, raise, and keep the world,” he muttered to himself. But I could hear him.

  “What? What do you know about spells?” This wasn’t going as planned already. Oh, right, I hadn’t planned it. I’d been pissed off and jealous; a poster girl for poorly done teenage rebellion. Now I’d gotten what I’d Wished for in front of me, and I had no idea what to do with him. I had to remind myself he was a fearsome demon.

  But he looked like a boy who needed help.

  Nothing like a ballerina, every step downward in my ballet flats echoed against the cement walls. Link burned my hand in warning, so I shoved it in my pocket.

  Standing within inches of him, our shoulders brushing, the boy didn’t even acknowledge I was there, just continued to look at the floor, murmuring and shaking his head. It gave me time to watch him up close. He smelled like nothing. Empty. A void, like The Gone.

  Cymbeline would have loved to get her hands on him.

  His skin was so pale and smooth it didn’t look real. His lips were thin, but perfectly etched, and now that I was closer I could see them moving, having conversations with too many people in his head. It looked agonizing.

  “She’s being fed ignorance…. The wrong power to serve…. The Air burns, Water chokes, Fire chills….”

  My hand shook and I clenched my fist to steady it before I touched his shoulder.

  His head snapped to the side so fast, it was clear he wasn’t human. But that wasn’t what scared me to my core.

  There is spirit in everything, and spirit is magic. Being my mother’s daughter, I saw things more deeply than the other witches. The distinct layer of other and more right under our noses. Things more breathtaking than sunlight after a darkness so deep it leaves the world hollow. Wild, heavenly magic that we sheltered from the world with The Chains.

  When my eyes met his, I couldn’t remember what beauty or life or spirit was. All I could see was The Gone.

  Chapter 7

  I fell back against the wall, knocking my head into it hard, which I think is the only thing that kept me from passing out. Nausea climbed up my throat, and the hallway’s stink of cigarette butts and disuse clung to my nostrils, choking me. Link rattled so angrily in my pocket that it banged against the wall repeatedly. It sounded like shackles clanging in a dungeon.

  “So many uses for Chains,” the demon boy said.

  Was he in my head like….others….were in his?

  “What are you doing here?” I asked with as much menace as I could muster while scrabbling along a wall.

  I prayed—actually prayed—he wouldn’t come closer. I couldn’t look into his eyes again, and if he was near me I wouldn’t be able to look away. His chin was still on his chest, the incoherent muttering louder than my own thoughts.

  I was an idiot to think he needed my help. When that was what he’d come from? When that was the place that made him what he was?

  The Poisons had been told about The Gone from the moment we learned we were created from deepest magic to keep that realm at bay. We’d been “born” with powers that fit into the world like a key in a lock, our mere presence designed to keep demons out of sight and mind. We had no idea what the demons would do to Earth. To us. It was hard to protect ourselves from something we were terrified of, but we’d learned to be terrified of The Gone, each and every one of us, even if we only had the vaguest idea of what it was.

  What we’d been told was less history lesson than fairy tales, but the Elementals live by their own rules; and we were taught exactly what we needed to know to keep us aware, but untainted.

  Looking into the boy’s eyes, I saw The Gone like a nightmare of drowning in chemicals. It wasn’t like I thought it would be; a place that mimicked Hell. Fuzzy as the image was, castle-like buildings in crayon box hues lined a narrow street. The air was alight with glow rather than brilliance. The outlines of people wandered, shadowy heads turning to each other in conversation. Could they know where they were?

  I felt what a lie it all was.

  And behind The Gone, I saw inside the demon in front of me. The chaos of his brain, the void in his heart. There was only one word for it; madness. And a terribly distinct awareness of it.

  He never moved but was in front of me again in a cold breeze, head cocked, studying me with those eyes that had gone from Hell black to luminescent blue, wide and blank, but hard. Being near him was to feel the absolute lack of magic in his soul.

  He gave me an unfriendly, tight-lipped smile. “My name is Lux,” he said, his own name like a foreign thing on his tongue. His voice was broken; not weak, but not whole. As if he’d learned a new language that was painful to use.

  I don’t know what I expected him to say, but I didn’t picture him telling me his name. I didn’t really think of him having a name—he was a thing, not a person.

  But then again, I wasn’t just a person either. Sometimes I felt like I was only a bundle of energy hiding from itself, too afraid to do anything else.

  “Witch of Stars,” he hissed, a sound like tea kettle steam. “You Wished me here.”

  I pushed off the wall, straightened up, the same height as him, making me not that short and him not that tall. “I Wished you to the stairs,” I said firmly, “but I didn’t Wish you here.” The longer he was near me the more questions I had for him. What did Vera Whisper to him? How did he get the link of chain? How did he get here at all, past The Chains, past me? What was he doing here, what were the demons’ plans?

  And more dangerously, what was The Gone really like?

  Why didn’t I want him to leave?

  My own uncertainty made my breath hitch in my throat, and thoughts poured into my mind, twisting and becoming dreadful prophecies that I believed to my core were inevitable. Panic attack edged closer to me than anything, even the stars, and the doom of it always lingered, and came out of nowhere.

  The demon looked at me, entirely focused, concerned. “Anxiety is an inferno where every thought, every noise, every possibility, every responsibility and task is a pitchfork turning the coals.”

  The rising waters of my panic suddenly settled. I took a deep breath, watching him watch me. “Yes,” I said. “Couldn’t have said it better myself.” My own pe
rsonal Hell and he could see it. He smiled sadly, sanely, but then shook his head hard, smacking it once against the wall.

  “Her stars are hidden by the liar sun,” he said, looking far away. With a twitch, he was back to me, with a flicker of others in his eyes. My heart stopped. I was looking at real beings in his eyes, with lives of their own. Other demons.

  They were laughing.

  “Your Wishes seethe with envy. Wishes with teeth and wants of their own. Hidden under babydoll dreams.”

  I was starting to feel like this was a scene from The Exorcist, and I needed to get the hell out of there.

  The way he spoke, in riddles not quite his own, made me cringe. His words felt carnivorous; they’d devour us both if they could. Panic welled, and I tried to picture my mom, how she would face a demon, but all I could think was how much she counted on me. How much this world counted on me, in the dirtiest hallway in Rocky Nook High School. And even more, I didn’t want to leave him alone with those demon predators inside him.

  Despite knowing of my predisposition to screw things up, and disappoint my mom, and get the expected I told you so from the Poisons, the diseased feeling of the demon’s presence excited me. My head swam, and magic raked through the air, diving at me like angry birds. Sweat ran down my back, my mouth went dry.

  “We serve the power and the power serves us,” I murmured, taking a deep breath, willing the calm to come.

  “The words brand you,” he said. Lux said. “Branded is another word for wounded.”

  So much for calm. Energy ruptured in my blood, and wouldn’t be held back.

  I’d been storing my magic up for so long, I’d never wondered if it would cooperate when released. If I couldn’t control it, I might not live through it. Fake it ‘til you make it, Celeste.

  I blinked away the haze in my eyes and focused on the silver claw marks of magic slicing in the air. I breathed them in and Wished for nobody to enter the stairwell, and heard the rusty deadbolt on the landing door slammed shut. I breathed out, the way my mom and I did when blowing bubbles to calm me from a panic attack, and popped my eyes open. Lux looked more frazzled than I felt, and that made it easier to keep breathing.

  “Just because you got through, don’t think this is your stepping stone to break The Chains. Your kind won’t ever take apart what we’ve created. Spells raise and keep the world, and it will take a hell of a lot more than one schizo demon boy to take them down.” Not bad.

  He slipped his hand out of his pocket, the chain link in his palm. As if it weren’t alarming enough that he had it, when chain links belonged to us, I blinked and it had become a butcher knife that he held casually. Impossible. Demons couldn’t touch chains, and they couldn’t use magic. None of this was real. I gritted my teeth and waited for him to speak.

  “You don’t even know what The Chains really are, you’re so entangled in them,” he said.

  Link slammed against my thigh, making me wince, but I wouldn’t back down. “I could Wish you right back to The Gone and you’d never get out again.”

  Then his hands were empty. “You wouldn’t. You wanted me here.”

  “You’re a demon. I would never,” I spat. A twinge of guilt at his downturned lips. “I don’t know you.”

  “You want to know me. You want to know more, because you know it’s there.” He smiled, stunning. Then shook his head, and a figure ran behind his eyes again. “Dip your fingers in the black, wet tea leaves, scrounge for the fortune nobody read. You’re as trapped as those in The Gone and you’re afraid of what it means.”

  “You’re talking nonsense.”

  He licked his lips, tipped his chin up. He knew things I didn’t, as crazy as he sounded. “You wish for things, ridiculous things, meaningless things, but I know what you lust after.”

  “No wish is meaningless,” I said, and nearly Wished there was venom on my tongue.

  He leaned into me, his nose inches from mine, and the ill will of him was like chloroform smothering me. And yet, I felt the violence wasn’t his. “Your own wishes take no courage, but you’re still too afraid to grant them. Meaningless. You lust for release.”

  And with that, he was gone, taking his chaos and barren heart with him.

  I hadn’t Wished for him to go.

  Chapter 8

  I couldn’t endure another second of school after that. Concentrating on anything academic was out of the question. I needed to be with my mom.

  I brushed crumbs off the seat of my car and went, slapping my palm on the steering wheel until it stung. As much as I wanted to hear my mom tell me that everything would be fine and that I hadn’t Wished for the demon boy to break through The Chains, there was something needling me that made me feel wrong.

  I wasn’t ready to tell anyone I’d spoken with Lux yet. I’d seen for a second a boy that couldn’t have friends, like me, and I pictured us being that friend for each other. I wanted to keep him for myself.

  My own coven would eat me alive for my weakness.

  There was a pressing pain behind my eye that said he was right about me, whatever he meant in all those riddles and ramblings. I did want to know more. I wanted to know about The Gone, why he would leave his home.

  I went through the Taco Bell drive-thru. Shoving a burrito in my mouth, I considered that if I was going to keep the incident with Lux quiet, I’d need to do something to at least fool myself into thinking it was for the coven. It was as much a lie as saying I ate the burrito because I was hungry.

  The Poisons were created solely because the possibility of the demons ever coming up from below was too risky. But we’d never seen a demon. Now that I had, it was hard to believe he was soulless. I could almost hear my mother say that I was creating a redeeming quality that wasn’t there. My imagination, the red-headed stepchild of our family. A family that didn’t exist. Me and my mom, who’d never even been pregnant with me, who only shared my blood from a ritual, nothing else.

  I shoved the horrible thought away and dug in the Taco Bell bag.

  Greater than my fear of the demon was my fear that the Poisons would destroy him. I was instantly jealous at the thought of another witch even talking to him. Worse was the thought of the Elementals getting a hold of him. Apart from my mom, the Elementals weren’t exactly stable. Being immortal didn’t make them strong of character. A stronger woman wouldn’t hit her daughter, or trap her like Cymbeline, or call her the horrible things I knew Delcine’s mother did. I couldn’t decide if they were weak because the Poisons used their magic as freely as they did, or if the Elementals would just be worse with more energy.

  But with a demon in their possession they’d be more powerful. They’d find a way to use him against the others—everything was a weapon to them.

  Shaking my head, I sucked down my orange soda with a side of Prescription Panic Pill, and tried not to think about how Lux had smelled like nothing. Clean. Like nothing could touch him.

  It made me want. Want all kinds of things I’d never wanted, and while I was afraid, it made me less anxious, less bottled than I’d ever been—while looking at a demon. A demon like my mother warned me about.

  I wasn’t telling anyone about having the power to Wish Lux to come to me. I planned to do it again. And again.

  My car was sputtering from being driven too much, in circles. It was an old rickety thing, and I was lucky to get it as soon as I’d gotten my license. All the Poisons had cars, some better than others—classic one-upping of each other from the Elementals. We all had the same birthday—Halloween. Every year, the Elementals and witches celebrated with a ritual together, even if our families despised each other. Halloween for witches is like Christmas for the guy who made all those animated movies with the Heat Miser and stuff. Everything changes when it comes. The magic that The Chains keep in place flexes its muscles. The Elementals do the same, and sometimes the Poisons do, too.

  We spent our birthdays in the woods behind a corn field, in the dark, with only the magic of the Elementals and the stars t
o illuminate us. We’d been told since we were thirteen that using magic too often would weaken the Elementals, that its preservation was necessary in case one day we needed it, and that using it was a poor display of discipline. But on Halloween, we were allowed to let it out to play.

  Except we’d all been afraid to. Like opening the prison door after too many years, and telling the convicts to run.

  “Show the magic that you own it,” the Fire Elemental hissed at Delcine on our fourteenth birthday. The Chains were more visible in October. We could see the links that wound through the trees, over the earth, waved in the breeze, looked alive. In the purple, dying day, a link burst out of the soil, just one link, and turned to a fleshy pink from its rusty dullness before our eyes.

  It screamed.

  Too stunned to move, the Poisons watched the fleshy chain wrap around Delcine’s ankle with the strength that held a world in place. The attached links joined it, one by one. We watched them shift between dirty metal and pink skin, and fail. But this one was stronger. The spirit of its magic was vile, cruel. It hated us.

  “Show the magic that you own it, Delcine! Don’t be as weak as The Chains you command!” We’d only known our powers for a year, and they were held away from us. Personalized, shiny baubles just out of reach.

  The Fire Elemental’s hair was a mass of flames around her head, and for the first time to me, she was ugly. The Poisons looked at each other, mouths hanging open, wondering who was going to help the Witch of Sweets as she struggled to no avail, crying out in panic.

  Nobody moved—not her mother, not the Poisons, not even my mom, but she smiled reassuringly at me. The chain link dug into Delcine’s ankle, grinding against bone. Blood gushed over her foot, tears ran down her cheeks, leaving trails of cheap mascara behind.

  “You told me not to use my magic or—”

  “Not tonight! This is your night, don’t waste it! Use magic when you must, you imbecilic slut!” her mother barked, flaming hair spitting ashes around her.