Forbidden Magic: The Complete Collection

by Anya Merchant

  “We’re both willing to do whatever it takes to get Kiara back,” said Lucy. “I think your part in it is easier than mine.”

  Without another word, she walked to the door with soft, inaudible steps and disappeared through it. Victor leaned his head back on the pillow and fell into a deep, satisfied sleep.

  CHAPTER 15

  Victor woke up a couple of hours later, at the first light of dawn. He could smell breakfast cooking in the kitchen, and didn’t waste any time getting up and getting dressed.

  Lucy wore one of her casual blouse and skirt combos, and stood in front of the stove, watching one pan with eggs and one pan with bacon. She turned and smiled slightly at Victor as he walked into the room.

  “Kronenberg has found a lead,” she said. “He says he needs help following up on the physical search.”

  “Alright.”

  Lucy turned back to focus on the food. Victor walked over to the counter and leaned against it for a moment.

  “We don’t have any time to waste, Victor,” said Lucy. She finished with the food and with quick movements, bound the egg, bacon, and a bit of cheese between two thick slices of bread. “Here.”

  Victor took the sandwich and nodded.

  “Well,” he said. “I guess I should get going.”

  Lucy nodded slowly.

  “You should,” she said.

  Outside, Victor walked to the edge of the sidewalk and then carefully focused his awareness.

  “Kronenberg, are you there?” he asked. Through the use of his nanites, he could communicate with Kronenberg and anyone with high-level access to the Nano Aura Department’s network. He heard silence for a second, and then a slightly muffled answer.

  “Victor?” asked Kronenberg. “Good timing, buddy. I’ve got something for you.”

  “No time to waste, let me have it.”

  “The library on Douglass Ave,” said Kronenberg. “It has an unnamed volume in the archives with the lost blueprints to the city’s subway network. Get there and find it, and you should be all set.”

  “I’m on it,” said Victor. “Kronenberg… Thanks.”

  “Thank me by bringing her back alive,” he said. “We all care about Kiara.”

  Victor frowned and forced himself to start jogging down the sidewalk.

  Apparently I show how much I care for her by sleeping with her older sister.

  He’d made decent enough time, taking shortcuts wherever he could. Most of the pedestrians out and about were walking in a groggy haze, and he was careful to telegraph his movements as he navigated his way through the crowds.

  Victor had just started jogging down a long alleyway that would save him a couple of minutes when a figure appeared at the other end. He slowed to a walk, instinctively preparing himself for a fight if it came to it.

  “Oh…” he said. “It’s you.”

  Ella stood across from him with her arms folded, a neutral expression on her face. Victor took a step as though to walk around her, and she moved to cut him off.

  “Victor,” she said softly. “Are you sure about this?”

  Victor frowned, realizing that it had been longer than usual since he’d last seen or heard from her.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” he said. “Kiara needs my help.”

  “You can’t head back down there,” said Ella. “Your enemy is too strong this time.”

  “I can beat it. I’ll find a way. Things always look bad, but in the end, I-”

  “You aren’t hearing me, Victor!” Ella snapped. “You’re going to get yourself killed!”

  “Are you scared about going down with the ship, so to speak?” he asked. “If I die, you die, too, right?”

  “If you died…” said Ella, in a soft voice. “There wouldn’t be much reason for me to keep on going.”

  Ella watched him contemplatively, as though coming to a hard decision.

  “I have to tell you something,” she said. “Something that’s going to be hard to hear… and even harder for me to say.”

  “…Alright.”

  Ella snapped her fingers and the world disappeared. It was as though someone had disconnected his eyes from his brain, completely omitting his sense of sight from his awareness. He didn’t see darkness, but rather, he no longer had the ability to see anything.

  “What…?” Victor took a staggered step back. “What the hell did you just do?”

  Ella snapped her fingers again, and Victor could see the alleyway in front of him. He stared at her, his mouth slacked open in shock.

  “Victor, you’ve known since I first entered your mind that I have control over things like this,” said Ella. “Over what you see, what you feel, what you experience.”

  “I know that, Ella,” said Victor. “But I don’t have time for this right now.”

  “Listen to me, Victor,” she said. “I care about you. Which puts me in a bit of a bind, this time.”

  Victor felt his lips tighten into a frown.

  “How much of the encounter with the monster do you actually remember?” asked Ella.

  “I remember…” Victor searched his thoughts. “I remember everything. How it looked, how it moved. What happened after it hit me with its mind-affecting attack.”

  “It was all me, Victor,” said Ella. “You weren’t fighting any monster. You were fighting Kiara, under my control. And you killed her.”

  Victor blinked, stared at her for a moment, and then shook his head.

  “Bullshit,” said Victor. “I still have the bruises to prove it!”

  “Kiara gave you those. She cared too much about you to use her auras on you,” said Ella. “She wanted to pull you out of it.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “I was jealous, and I wanted her dead,” said Ella. “And then you came up to the surface, so intent on finding her and bringing her back. So last night, I tried again.”

  “What… are you saying?”

  “Didn’t things seem a little too perfect with Lucy?” asked Ella.

  Victor felt a cold shiver run down his spine. He stared at her for several long, painful seconds.

  Could she be… telling the truth?

  Finally, he came to a conclusion, feeling logic born from desperation click into place.

  “Nice try, Ella,” he said. “The cave in when I was escaping the cavern didn’t happen by accident.”

  “That was-“

  “The sheets.”

  Ella looked at him blankly.

  “Lucy pulled back the sheets when she climbed into the bed,” he said. “And she took off my shirt for me.”

  “But… how do you know I didn’t-“

  “You couldn’t,” said Victor. “Your reach doesn’t extend into the physical world. And I know you. It’s more likely that you’d avoid having to make things more complicated than they needed to be.”

  Ella said nothing. Victor took a few steps forward and locked eyes with her.

  “Ella, listen to me,” he said. “I know you’re trying to protect me. I know you’d do anything to keep me safe.”

  Tears formed in the corner of Ella’s eyes. She knew him well enough to know what he was about to say.

  “But if you ever try to lie to me like this again, I will find a way to get you out of my head.” His voice was cold and hard.

  “Victor, you don’t under-”

  “I understand perfectly,” he said.

  “No, you don’t!” Ella was shouting now. She pushed him roughly, and though it didn’t move him at all, he still felt it in his body.

  “Ella, stop this!”

  “Do you think I wanted this?” she asked, tears streaming down her face. “This is my life now. This is how I exist. I’m your permanent ride-along. I get to see the boy I loved, the boy that fought to save me, like a prince in shining armor, break my heart over and over again…”

  She turned away from him and faded into the thin air.

  “And now I get to watch him die, whether I like it or not.”

  Victor
stood in the alleyway for another minute, feeling more than thinking. He started walking again. His feet felt heavy.

  CHAPTER 16

  The library sat on the corner of a street in the sprawling northern outskirts of town. Victor made his way up the stairs and pushed through two ancient, polished wood doors. The silence inside was a little jarring, and as far as he could see, the library was empty other than him and the librarian behind the counter.

  It’s still pretty early. I’m probably the first patron of the day.

  He wandered toward the front desk, feeling a bit intimidated by the number of shelves and his complete lack of even a wild guess at where to start looking. The librarian, a plump, but pleasant enough looking woman, frowned and peered over her horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Can I help you with something, sir?”

  “Uh, yes,” said Victor. “I’m looking for something out of the archives. A few old blueprints of the city’s subway system, how it would have looked if the construction had been finished.”

  The librarian gave him a curious look but didn’t pry into his reasons.

  “Certainly.” She stood up from her chair and walked around to the lobby. “Something like that would be in our reference section. Follow me, please.”

  Victor wasn’t illiterate, but he’d never been much of a reader growing up, at least not to the point of spending much time in libraries. The inside of the building gave off a strange vibe, a reverence for dusty books and meticulous order that contrasted against the chaos of the outside world, and regular life.

  Each step he took across the old tile floor echoed against the walls, but the rows of bookshelves dampened the sound slightly, making it feel as though the library intended to absorb the sound for the sake of preserving the silence. The librarian, rather appropriately, didn’t say much.

  She stopped in front of a large shelf in the back of the room that was stuffed with nontraditional books, the volumes varying in size and appearance. Some of them were just documents stuffed into manila folders, and others were loosely bound, or stitched together with staples. The librarian scanned across all of them, her finger slowly touching each volume or document as she went by.

  “Hmmm…” she mused. “This is where it should be. I didn’t expect anyone to have checked out something like this, but I guess someone must have.”

  She smiled politely at Victor, who did his best not to frown.

  “All I need is information out of the blueprints,” he said. “If you could give me the name of whoever took them out, or even just the phone number, I could-“

  “I’m sorry sir, but that kind of thing goes against my ethical code,” said the librarian. “It just wouldn’t be possible.”

  Victor sighed, and without any hesitation, bound his scarlet aura to the woman with an intensity that was almost rude. Her mouth dropped open, and her knees began to quiver visibly.

  “Are you sure there is no way for you to help me?” Victor asked. “It’s to help someone that’s in grave danger.”

  The woman stepped in closer to him and nodded slowly.

  “I… might be able to make an exception,” said the woman. “If you wouldn’t mind staying here for a moment… and having some tea with me?”

  If I had the time, I just might consider it.

  The thought made him feel a little ashamed of himself, but he knew in the back of his mind that he was willing to do whatever it would take to save Kiara. So Victor played his part, grinning wolfishly and meeting the librarian’s eye.

  “Maybe we can skip right to the point?” He stepped in closer to her and slipped a hand under her skirt. She didn’t stop him, not even as he made contact with her panties with his index and middle fingers, slowly caressing across her cloth covered mound.

  It only took a few seconds, no longer than a minute, at most. The woman let out a moan that turned into a small squeal of pleasure. Her knees buckled inward in she fell to the ground in a crumpled, orgasmic heap.

  “I… wow…” She shook her head and gawked at him. “I’ve never done anything like that before!”

  “The phone number…” repeated Victor.

  Five minutes later, he stood outside the library with not just the number, but the address of one “Annette Lockwood”, the last recipient of the blueprints he needed. Victor tried calling and got no answer.

  It’s not too far. I doubt she’d mind if I made a house call.

  It took Victor about ten minutes to get there. The address was in an area of north Undercliff City that had been gentrified out of the price range of regular people. Still, Victor almost had to do a double-take when he reached the right street. The house was extravagant, far more expensive than anything owned by anyone outside of the richest of the rich could afford.

  The other houses nearby, the neighborhood, was expensive, but Annette’s house went above and beyond the rest. The property was expansive enough for plenty of creature comforts like guest houses, pools, and expansive gardens fit with room to spare. A heavy black fence ran around the outer edge of the yard, with a single electronic sliding metal gate creating an opening to the road.

  Victor felt his heart sink. Part of him had hoped that he’d at least have the option of sneaking in and searching for the blueprints, if need be. There wasn’t enough time for him to try something like that here, not by a long shot.

  He slowly walked over to the gate, half expecting a guard to jump out of the bushes and point a gun at his head. Nothing happened. Built into the threshold of the side of the gate was a small black intercom with two buttons on it. Victor walked over to it, pressed one of them, and said “Hello?”

  Nothing happened. He tried the other one and got a similar result. Victor stood there for a while, internally debating whether he should just climb the fence and make an attempt at searching anyway, when the gate began to slide open, whisper silent.

  “Uh… okay?” Victor scratched his head and frowned, an unusual feeling spreading through his fingertips and toes. He stood there for a moment more, and then slowly began walking inside.

  CHAPTER 17

  The front yard, even excluding the sections occupied by Annette Lockwood’s extravagant gardens, could have fit the townhouse that Victor and Kronenberg shared inside of it fifty times over, with room to spare. Victor walked slowly, or at least it felt that way, along the winding path up to the mansion’s front doors.

  When he reached them, he again felt a bit like he had standing outside the gate. There was no doorbell of any kind to speak of, and the idea of knocking and having the sound carry throughout such a large house was a bit too hopeful for him to consider.

  He tried anyway, several times in a row. Victor stood there, feeling a bit foolish, knocking and waiting, for about five minutes, a much longer amount of time under the circumstance than the number would suggest.

  Finally, he heard a noise, not from behind the door, but further off. Victor walked back down the winding path and took one of the offshoots that led toward the back of the house. He could have just walked on the grass, but it felt somehow inappropriate, given how perfectly manicured it was.

  It would be like wearing muddy shoes inside.

  Victor spotted the swimming pool, a large, but not quite Olympic sized rectangle set in the ground and surrounded by rock gardens and cherry trees. A woman wearing a blue bikini was swimming in it, her hair trailing around her in thousands of wild, jet black locks.

  She was facing away from him when she surfaced on the other side of the pool, but climbed out and turned around as though totally aware of his presence. She met his eye and smiled, and then waved her hand in a manner that made Victor feel a sudden stab of unwanted awkwardness.

  “Mind bringing me a towel?” She pointed to a nearby pool chair with something fluffy and white folded neatly on it.

  Victor picked up the towel and walked it over to her. His eyes ran across her body, ogling her as much as examining. She was tall, with big breasts, nice thighs, pale skin, and long black hair. Her
face was pretty in a sharp sort of way, as though it had been chiseled from marble by a master craftsmen well versed in the female form. Her eyes were the color of crystalline ice, cold and beautiful.

  “Uh, hi,” he said. “My name is Victor. Victor Anders.”

  “Annette Lockwood. A pleasure.”

  She looked to be about 40 or so, though most of that age was in her expressions and mannerisms, rather than her flawlessly toned body. Annette began to dry herself off with slow, easy movements. Victor started to bring himself back to the reason why he was there when another question popped into his head.

  “Did you buzz me in personally at the gate?” asked Victor.

  Annette nodded, smiling at him as she carefully wrapped the towel into a makeshift skirt around her waist.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I thought you looked kind of cute,” said Annette. “There’s something about your face, or maybe your eyes. I could tell that you were here for a good, honest reason.”

  She started walking down the path, back toward the front of the house. Victor followed her without needing to be told.

  “That’s awfully trusting of you, don’t you think?” he said.

  “Was I wrong?” Annette shot him an amused look over the shoulder. “Why are you here, Victor?”

  “I need to get my hands on something you checked out of the library.”

  That sounded a lot more compelling in my head than it did out loud.

  Annette laughed and skipped up the front steps of the mansion. She opened the apparently unlocked front door and Victor followed her inside. A huge chamber lay on the other side of it with chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and two sets of stairs that spiraled up around a massive statue leading up to the second level, and an expensive looking custom cut carpet.

  “Would you like to come up to my room with me, and talk some more, Victor?” asked Annette.

  Victor took a deep breath that was meant to be calming. It only seemed to intensify his frustration.