Forbidden Magic: The Complete Collection

by Anya Merchant

  Victor felt every bruise, cut, and fracture in his body, along with his wounded shoulder. What he didn’t feel was anything other than his scarlet aura that he could channel energy into.

  Come on, there has to be something.

  He took a deep breath and tried not to think about what Lucy had said about the blood transfusion. There was no telling how much time he had to work with. Part of him was already working to accept the reality of his fate, and rationalizing why it wouldn’t be so bad to go back to being normal.

  Normal isn’t going to save lives. Normal isn’t going to let me stop people who abuse their abilities.

  Victor closed his eyes and focused. He forced himself to remember the way Night Angel had moved, and the way she’d used her nano auras against him. He’d seen her use at least three, and each of them had looked different. His own scarlet aura was red, but she’d also used one that had been bright white, and another that was dark purple, almost black.

  The diamond and onyx auras. If she can use those, then maybe I can, too.

  He bit his lip and concentrated hard enough to make his temples ache. There was something, all the way out on the edge of what he could sense. It felt different, almost dangerous, and destructive.

  It reminded Victor of the intrusive flashes of impulse he’d get when walking across a tall bridge, or sitting behind the wheel of a car. It was that same sensation of possibility, of being able to jump into the open air, or speed up through a red light, that he could faintly feel in his distant awareness. Victor tugged on whatever it was and felt something give way.

  Instantly, his perspective changed, or rather, expanded. It was painful, and he had to stifle an aching scream. His injuries felt ten times worse than they had before, vivid and compelling to the point of making tears form in the corners of his eyes.

  I need to focus!

  More than just pain came with the new awareness. Victor could hear what was going on outside the room, and he could see the walls clearly enough to see the stitches on the protective padding, and particles of dust clinging to the surface.

  He could hear the sound of the woman outside his room flipping through her magazine and fiddling with her hair. Kronenberg was right. There was only one guard, and she was currently paying him about as much mind as a parent would give a sleeping child.

  The woman continued like that for several minutes. Victor had to slip out of his focused state. The dark purple aura that surrounded him when he used it was the same one he’d seen around Night Angel, while she’d been controlling the men. He’d also seen it before ever coming to Undercliff City, and thinking about how it had been used back then made him feel sick to his stomach.

  The onyx aura. I hate it, but I don’t have a choice. I won’t use it like they did.

  Victor bound his onyx aura to his senses and listened. The woman was walking down the hall, away from the door. More importantly, he didn’t hear the sound of her keyring in her pocket.

  The woman continued, eventually slipping into one of the public restrooms. Victor immediately forced himself up and out of bed, his body protesting as pain shot through his abdomen and limbs.

  His legs wobbled as he picked himself up. What came next was even worse. Victor dragged the bed with him as he made his way across the room. There were wheels underneath it, but they’d been locked in place, and the heavy metal frame was almost too much for his weakened body to handle.

  “Come on, Victor,” he muttered. “Can’t stay in bed all day.”

  It took him longer than he would have liked to make it to the door, but he managed it. The door knob was, as expected, locked. With all the finesse he was capable of, Victor bound his scarlet aura into the metal slide catch, which he could just barely get a finger on against the crack.

  He focused for a couple of seconds. A bit of smoke came from some component or another of the mechanism, but no fire broke out. The metal softened enough for the doorknob’s catch to bend within it. Victor leaned all his weight against the door as he pulled back, and with a sudden creak, it fell open.

  He tumbled back onto the now conveniently positioned bed and then scrambled up. The table the woman had been sitting at was just far enough out into the hallway to force him to maneuver the bed partway through the door.

  I’m running out of time!

  Victor shifted the bed onto its side and then pulled. One of the legs caught against the door frame and it jammed into place. He swore under his breath and stretched his free arm as far out as he could get it to go.

  He managed to get the tip of one of his fingers against the woman’s key ring, and then with finger dexterity he hadn’t known he possessed, Victor pulled it across the desk and into his hand.

  Trying the keys seemed to take more time than the rest of the escape combined. There were at least thirty keys on the ring. Only ten of them were the right size to fit the handcuffs, but it wasn’t until the seventh one Victor tried that the metal bracelet came loose.

  “Yes!” He stretched his hand and then took off down the hall. The floor he was on was mostly empty, and his guard was still in the bathroom. It wasn’t until Victor had reached the double doors leading to the elevator that he stopped to consider his situation.

  He was wearing a hospital gown and nothing else. It was thin and insubstantial, with only a few short ties in back to keep it from flapping open and giving people the moon. Despite his aching body, the confined, highly trafficked elevator would be too much of a risk. Victor took the stairs instead.

  He immediately discovered two things. The first was that his body hated him, and the second was that Lucy had the good sense to put him into confinement relatively high up in the tower. He was on the 32nd floor, and that meant he would have to climb down more sets of stairs than he’d ever gone down before in one go, with all of his injuries nagging him every step of the way.

  When this is all over, I’m going to get one of those drones that Kronenberg uses and never move my meat bag body again.

  He slowed to a stop on the 18th floor. Excited voices and giggling were coming from the next landing down, and it took Victor a couple of seconds to realize that he’d stumbled into two employees in the middle an illicit rendezvous.

  “I can’t! He’s going to find out.”

  “Come on, nobody even knows we’re here.”

  Victor cleared his throat as loudly as he could and stomped a couple of times. He heard scampering, followed by one of the doors shutting, and smiled.

  Then rest of the trip down to the parking garage was almost uneventful. A few employees stood outside the staircase door. From the way they were standing, it looked as though they were on guard, possibly waiting for him specifically.

  Victor chewed his lip for a moment and then saw the fire alarm. It was probably the most immature tactic he could think of to take, but he was too tired to rely on his nano auras, and there was something straightforward enough about it.

  He pulled the plunger on the red panel down and a loud buzzing noise sounded over a speaker above him. The employees outside the door looked around for a moment, confused. One of them headed back toward the stairs while the other two headed for the main exit to the street.

  The timing on this is going to be critical.

  Victor pushed himself against the wall directly behind the entrance. The employee rushed in, almost slamming the door against Victor’s face as he hurried by him. Victor quickly slipped around, making it back through the doorway and into the parking garage before it shut all the way. As far as he could tell, nobody noticed him as he ran across the underground lot.

  It was late evening outside, and Victor felt his inner clock revolt as he looked up at the dark sky. A small group of Monteiro employees were forming into a large clump outside the doors that led into the main lobby. Victor turned and hurried off in the opposite directions.

  Alright. Now what?

  CHAPTER 18

  Excluding the thin hospital gown, Victor carried nothing else on his person. The c
old, inconsiderate autumn wind mocked him with every step he took. He wished that he’d taken the time to find some clothes or maybe even his cell phone at the start of his escape.

  The only stroke of luck that greeted him was the relative lack of pedestrians out. The few that he saw as he hurried away from the city center were either destitute, distracted, or somewhat amused. Nobody tried to stop him, at least.

  Finding Night Angel was outside the realm of immediate possibility. Victor didn’t even mull the idea over. His escape was as much about buying himself some time and keeping his abilities for a few days longer as it was about playing the hero and rushing into a dramatic showdown.

  His bare feet collected their share of blisters and cuts as he walked. It took him about twenty minutes to reach his destination. Outside of the bus stop where he’d first arrived and Monteiro Tower, it was the only place in Undercliff City that Victor could find without a map.

  Most of the houses on the street were abandoned. A stray cat hopped its way through an overgrown lawn. Victor was far enough into the outskirts of the city to pick up on the hopelessness of the poverty that Undercliff City was still, in large parts, working to overcome.

  This used to be a thriving suburb, once upon a time.

  He pushed past the gate of the once white picket fence, now a mess of rotting wood and chipped paint, and headed for the front door. Victor remembered the house from back when he and his father had lived in it over a decade ago.

  The interior smelled of stale air and mold. None of the light fixtures worked, but that was as expected. Each step Victor took left a footprint in the thick layer of dust that’d collected over the years. He walked into to living room and stood next to the old couch.

  “Dad?”

  Victor was eight years old again. That was when it had all begun. It was late at night, and he’d spent most of the afternoon fending for himself. His dinner had been a plain bologna sandwich, and he’d taken the bread from the far end of the loaf, where it was still fresh enough to be edible.

  “Dad?”

  The basement was the one area of the house where Victor was never allowed to go. His father would disappear down into it, sometimes for days at a time. It was a place that seemed to feed off his optimism. Victor’s father would always head down there with energy and hope and only come back upstairs once it had all been sucked out of him, replaced by misery and drunken self-loathing.

  “I’ll be up in a minute, Victor.” John’s voice came, sure enough, through the closed basement door. His words were a lie. It would be hours, or more than likely, another day before Victor would see him again.

  “Dad, I don’t have any clean clothes left…” Victor slowly turned the knob, hating the idea of heading down into the dark, dank cellar. “And someone stopped by to leave a note on the door.”

  John Anders didn’t say anything, even as Victor started down the creaky stairs. A single light bulb hanging from an open wire in the center of the room was the only illumination. It gave off just enough light to let Victor see what his father was doing.

  A small, metallic case lay open on his work bench. John was staring at a loaded syringe that looked like it fit into it. He blinked, and then looked over at his shoulder at Victor.

  “I have to do this, Victor.” John shook his head. “I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t.”

  “Dad…” Victor took a step back. “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re going to be leaving Undercliff City soon. Real soon.” He smiled faintly at his son. “This is the last chance I’ll get. The research must go on.”

  Victor felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. His father turned the syringe around in his hand, and then pulled up the sleeve of his dress shirt and slipped it into one of his veins. He pushed down on the plunger, and time stood still.

  John let out a small cough and then sneezed. He blinked a couple of times, smiled at his son, set the syringe down on the work bench, and then fell to the cold cement cellar floor.

  “Dad!” Victor rushed toward him but stopped after a few steps. His father’s body began seizing with inhuman movements, twisting and writhing on the floor as though possessed by something truly evil.

  “Agh…” John made a noise, and his face contorted into a pained expression. “Grah…”

  “No!” Victor forced himself forward. He put an arm on his father’s shoulder and was immediately struck across the face by a wild, contorting arm. He let out a cry of surprise and felt blood begin to drip from his nose.

  “Stay back…” John took a couple of deep breaths and forced his body under control. “It… no… it can’t be.”

  “Please, Dad.” Victor shook his head as the tears started to come. “Stop it…”

  John Anders put a hand on his forehead and held it there for several long seconds. Then he looked up at his son and smiled.

  “It didn’t work…” He looked as though he was holding back tears of his own. “This was my last chance, and I… failed.”

  Victor couldn’t think of anything to say.

  It took a couple of seconds for Victor to be able to think clearly under the weight of his childhood memories. He took the rest of the steps down into the basement and made a beeline for his father’s closet.

  They’d left Undercliff City in a rush. Victor had been too young at the time to understand completely why, but he knew it had something to do with Monteiro and the way his father had left the company.

  The cellar had a hidden storage space underneath the stairs, and that was where all of the stuff that couldn’t fit in a single car load had gone. Victor found the edge of the wooden slab that served as a door and carefully pulled it open, the same way he’d seen his father do it on the day they’d left.

  I never thought we’d be away for so many years.

  Boxes lined the tiny storage space. Victor pulled them out one by one, opening them to see if they had what he needed. He found kitchen utensils, old toys, and one box filled with his mother’s old clothing. Victor smiled sadly, remembering how pained his father had been at having to leave those behind.

  I barely have any memories left of her. I’ll… come back for these, this time.

  He finally found what he needed, a box filled with his father’s work clothes. After carefully replacing everything else and closing up the storage space, Victor began getting dressed.

  They were dress clothes, the type that gave one a neat and professional appearance. It made perfect sense to Victor that his father had left them behind. Leaving Undercliff City had turned him into a different person, the type of person who didn’t need that kind of clothing.

  He pulled on dress pants, a dress shirt, a belt with a polished buckle, and black socks. All of it fit him surprisingly well, and other than a bit of dust on the outside, they were in perfect condition. Victor tucked the shirt in and pulled on a pair of polished black shoes, along with a dark navy blazer. He left his father’s ties where they were, and headed back up the stairs.

  CHAPTER 19

  It was dark outside. Victor took a few steps into the street, looked up at the partially cloud-covered moon, and then heard someone call his name.

  “…Vic… Victor.”

  “Huh?” He looked around. There were no nearby pedestrians.

  “Victor, you dumbass.”

  “What?”

  “Alright, finally.” Kronenberg’s voice seemed to be coming from every direction. “How’s it going buddy? From the looks of it, you managed to—“

  “What the fuck?” Victor began running his hands over his head.

  “You’re not losing your mind, Victor,” said Lucy. “You should be able to hear us now through your nanites. The injection we gave you the other day included a calibration booster.”

  That’s the type of explanation I’d probably get from myself if I were losing my mind.

  “This is a little weird.” He took a deep breath and shook his head. “Can you hear what I say, too?”

&n
bsp; “Obviously.” Lucy’s voice was straightforward and serious. “Get back to Monteiro Tower, Victor. This has gone on for long enough. You’re putting yourself at risk.”

  “Lucy, hold on. We can give him a shot at this. He’s already—“

  “No,” said Lucy. “He isn’t ready.”

  “He’s the only chance we’ve got!” shouted Kronenberg. “Nobody else is in the field close enough, and the police won’t make it in time.”

  Victor heard Lucy let out an annoyed sigh.

  “As much as I love listening to the voices in my head argue amongst themselves, I feel like I should probably take part in this discussion.” Victor walked down the street, thankful that he was in an empty part of town where talking to himself would go unnoticed.

  “Victor, we found something out about Night Angel,” said Kronenberg. “She matches the description of a former employee of Heaven’s Gallery named Keiko Yamazuki.”

  “That makes sense,” said Victor. “It explains how she managed to get Mike Sanchez back under her control so easily.”

  “And get this. Keiko Yamazaki is a student at Undercliff University. More specifically, she’s one of Terrance’s students.”

  Terrance… He’s one of the program directors at Monteiro!

  “Terrance left work early today,” said Lucy. “I called his house and didn’t get an answer.”

  “What’s the address?” asked Victor.

  The line went blissfully silent for a moment.

  “355 Nightvale Avenue.” Lucy sounded tired, and more than a little concerned. “Victor… please be careful.”

  “Of course.” He grinned and broke into a run as Kronenberg began to give him more detailed directions.

  Terrance lived in one of the upper-class neighborhoods, literally cordoned off from the more impoverished parts of the outer city by a tall rod iron fence. Victor paused briefly at it before throwing caution to the wind and climbing over.

  It’s fine if someone calls the police. I could probably use the backup.