The Wishing Heart

by J. C. Welker

  Grabbing the switchblade from her belt, Rebel lunged between Anjeline and the man-made devil. “Whatever you are, stay back,” she snapped, trying to shake off the buzzing in the air. “I warn you, I’m scrappy.”

  His laugh dug claws into her ears, scratching its way into her chest, embedding into her insides. “Of course you are. You’re of my own flesh. A born fighter. I’ve been looking forward to this moment”—Nero gazed at her with fathomless eyes—“daughter.”

  Rebel clutched her knife so tightly her palm hurt. “You’re delusional.”

  The scraping at the window increased, insistent now.

  Smoke rose from Anjeline’s curled fists as the effort of trying to shift brought fiery tears to her eyes. Rebel knew she’d waited for this moment, to stand before her captor, to reap justice. Her eyes blazed, looking as if she might turn into a bonfire. “What have you done with Jezreel?” Anjeline hissed, her voice constricting, either in wrath or panic.

  “Oh, I imagine the old goat’s swimming with the fishes—or should I say, Siren—by now. Not too great, is he?” Nero’s calm voice sounded more menacing than outright violence.

  “You murdered my father.” Piran’s wings trembled in rage. “I’ll destroy you!”

  “Put those things away.” Nero lifted a finger into the air.

  An invisible force hit them.

  Piran flew backward, sliding across the floor. The cloying, overwhelming magic surged forward, bending them toward it. It slid around Rebel, so thick and intense she felt as though she could reach out and touch it. It was more than a force—it was an abominable power, and a myriad of other things that assaulted her all at once. This wasn’t the serene, pure magic she’d felt from Anjeline, or the melodious magic, flowing through the halls of the Sun Court.

  This was a merciless, sickening dark magic.

  Rebel and Anjeline tried to move toward the door, but their feet weren’t acting right. She opened her mouth but found that terror had taken her voice. Her heart might beat out of her chest with it. Then she felt a tepid magic. Anjeline’s. It curled around Rebel, weighing against the magician’s. But her bindings kept her full power under its control.

  Nero chuckled, his grin a rictus of repulsion. “The Wishmaker finally found her trusting soul, and it’s my daughter, no less.”

  “I have no father.” Rebel felt sick. “You’re pretty alive for a dead man.”

  “How wrong you are, child. When you stole that vase, you set events into motion, a domino effect that led you to me. You have a way of sniffing out magical items, much like your dear mother.” He pointed at her pendant, and again it pulsed. “Ever wondered why it’s engraved with R.E.B.E.L.? It’s initials. Your mother’s in fact—Renata Eve Bell-erose LaFay.”

  She jerked back like she’d been hit. “Her name?”

  “As excessively long and lovely as herself,” he said.

  The words ran through her, sinking in deeper with the pendant’s thrum. Her mother’s name had been there in plain sight, within her grasp. Her insides spasmed as she realized her mother was alive. She felt as if her entire life had been built on a sinkhole, and now the ground was moving. Her eyes drew back to Nero, his lure growing palpable, his face nothing but savage lines, but he looked indistinctive somehow. Like Rebel was seeing him through liquid. She wanted to step closer, to see him fully.

  A hand tugged at her, drawing her senses back.

  “He’s manipulating you, Rebel. He will promise you the moon with his one hand and steal your soul with the other.” Anjeline’s voice cut through the enthrall. Rebel pressed against her side, bent under his magic, weakened by its force. It was thick with possibilities that played over their senses. Piran made a sound from the floor, his wings curled around him as he tried, unsuccessfully, to crawl to the door.

  Maybe, Rebel thought, but the name does fit. “You’re lying.”

  A smile one could misjudge as trustful curled Nero’s mouth. “I may be quite the deceiver. But why would I lie about my own daughter?”

  “I watched you destroy your child.” Anjeline sneered, her heat spreading.

  His smile vanished. “You watched some destroy themselves. Though none were of my own flesh.”

  “My parents”—Rebel hated the waver of her voice—“are dead.”

  “Well, then, I make a dynamic corpse,” he said in a tune of detached mirth. “Renata didn’t care for my ways of magic, and a child born of light and dark as you, is forbidden. The Magus Order would’ve cleansed you of magic. But then your mother ran off with you. Quite dashing, too.” He said it as though he were being kind. “She trusted the Sidhe, charged one with tucking you away in a secret location not even she knew. Didn’t give you a proper name in fear you’d be found. Though she did leave you with that hidden Talisman, a protection pendant. Safeguarding you. Because, if you were oblivious—”

  Rebel understood. “I wouldn’t look for her…”

  “And put yourself on his radar.” Anjeline tugged at her to move.

  The scratching at the window grew louder.

  Blood pounded in Rebel’s ears, her breathing turning into short pants. Realization now came in pieces of suspicion that she’d stored away, the many dreams surfacing, only now understanding that they were memories. Impressions of her mother. Of being swaddled and then chaotic ones, of her mother frantic, hurrying down a snow-covered street clutching a child to her breast. Those pieces of her jigsaw puzzle life had remained indefinable. Now Rebel knew what those pieces meant.

  “You inherited your cleverness from your mother.” Nero studied her. “The one magician who knows me better than myself. The only one capable of stealing a jinni from my possession. After years of you being hidden, she thought she could implore the Wishmaker to seek you out before I did.”

  Anjeline stopped pulling her.

  Rebel’s mouth turned dry. “Seek me out?”

  “Thieves should know who they are thieving from.” He let out another chuckle. “As if fate doesn’t laugh enough, you go and steal the jinni right out from under your mother’s nose. And here we are.”

  From my mother? She locked eyes with Anjeline, both now grasping the identity of that magician woman Gramone had bespelled. Of all the apartments she could have broken into, it had been her mother’s. Now it clicked—why the picture hidden in her pendant had seemed so familiar to Anjeline. It had been her mother who liberated the vase from Nero’s grasp. Rebel was the “dead child” she’d been searching for.

  “Stop listening to him. We have to get out of here.” Anjeline had one hand on Rebel’s wildly beating heart and began trying to half pull, half shove her toward the door.

  “Ah, ah.” Nero chided with a shake of his head. “Not another step. Unless you wish to be introduced to my furry devils.”

  Growling rumbled from behind the steel door.

  Blurred silhouettes were gathering outside of the windows, moving fast from either side like ghostly sentries. The impervious wards on the building had been broken. Rebel’s thoughts spun furiously. How could she get Anjeline away from him? She spared a glance down at Piran on the floor. “Can’t you poof us out of here with dust or something?” Piran began to laugh, a drunken, magic-induced cackle, and then he stopped, as if he realized he wasn’t where he thought he was.

  Nero took another step, his soulless focus on Rebel. “It still surprises me that you survived, a child born by the blood of both dark and light magicians.”

  She tried ignoring his pull of sorcery and inched back. “There’s no magic in me.”

  “Wrong again. You are a terribly magical thing in an unmagical world, and that is why your heart cannot breathe.”

  Rebel froze. His eyes darted to her chest and up to her face, knowing. She pressed back against Anjeline and held up her switchblade to stem the flow of what surely would be explanations and rationalities she didn’t want to hear from this sinner man.

  “This is your inheritance. A crime given for the least of crimes, an accident of birth.”
Nero’s words churned with a seductive pull. “The dark and light magic within your heart can’t exist together. One will kill the other, or it will kill you. The one that lives is the one you feed. And you’ve had an awful lot of darkness in your life…”

  Haven’t you, dear? a voice whispered in her head. A change was happening beneath Rebel’s skin, inside her most precious organ, a shifting as monumental as the world tipping off its axis. You’re magical. Dizziness came over her. She shook her head as if it could knock the voice loose in her mind, the words that weren’t hers.

  “Get out of her head!” Anjeline’s skin lit up in fury.

  The snarling shadows at the windows grew.

  Rebel swayed as a dagger of pain filled her chest, but Anjeline kept hands on her. A boom sounded. Something was hurling itself at the metal door. She considered herself strong enough to weather any storm, but dread turned her blood to ice. Her teeth ground together, against the crippling magic that gave everything a blood-red tint.

  “Rebel…” A wave of it pushed through the air as Nero called to her. “I could fix your heart without a wish.”

  It was at that moment she finally understood.

  “That’s what you want? My heart?” So this was the reason this nightmare had engulfed her. If she were his offspring, he’d rip it out of her chest, use it for a wish.

  A shield of heat wrapped around her like a living thing.

  Anjeline’s eyes flared into an inferno. “You can’t have it.”

  With an annoyed chuckle, Nero shook his head. “For years, I’ve searched for you, Rebel. So you must know how disappointed I am to discover your thieving ways. Your heart’s anything but noble, unusable for my wishes. Though, it may still be useful. I could teach you how to garnish your magic. We’ll find a selfless heart together and have all the wishes we desire.” He emphasized the words with a telltale flexing of fingers, creating another ripple.

  Come, he whispered in her mind.

  Warm arms wrapped around her waist, the touch cutting through. Rebel shivered against Anjeline as his force weighed. When she looked back at him, she saw past his fatherly facade to his cruel gaze as if she were just a pawn he could place on his board.

  “I’d take death over you,” she said fiercely.

  His face twisted, but it wasn’t the vile grin of madness. It was sad, empty. “Then you’ll die as you have lived. Alone.”

  The windows exploded in a shower of glass. Shards rained down, pelting them with jagged flakes, and in crashed a dozen armored shapes. The metal door bent inward like a playing card. Bolts popped from the doorframe as more figures barreled through. Growling, four-footed beasts.

  The Night Guard.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The thud of multiple paws encircled Anjeline. She lurched back, pushing closer into Rebel as panting chuckles streamed from the troupe. Their armored backbones rippled, and scraping claws sent sparks across the marble. The alpha touched down on his forelegs, and within two steps, molded into a rising wave of muscle and fur, snapping bone back into form.

  Now on either side of Nero, blood-red wolves panted.

  Smoke flared under Anjeline’s skin, wavering between altering into an enormous panther and unable to move against his commanding power. This was the force that had imprisoned her. Violated her magic. She’d waited for this moment, to have him before her, and still she could do nothing. Bound. The strain of his mark tugged at her like a thousand horses, but somehow, Rebel’s aura pressing into her essence kept her from being pulled forward.

  Nero waved his hand. “The vase.” He glanced from the alpha to the bag.

  Feral hunger glowed in multiple amber eyes as the wolves crouched closer. A guttural answer rose from Wulfram’s throat, and he took another step. Something in the cast of his face appeared more youthful than before, his body more roped in burliness, like his wish for rejuvenation had inflated his strength, compelling his viciousness.

  The hand on Anjeline’s arm tightened. Rebel’s eyes flashed in alarm, realizing there was but one thing that might save them now. “I can still wish us out of here…” she said.

  Anjeline shook her head. “It won’t work, not with his hold on me.”

  In the presence of Nero, his power canceled the imprints of any other left on the vessel, unless he allowed it. Even if Rebel wished to vanish from here, Anjeline wouldn’t be able to cast it into being. Piran was still dazed, sprawled on the floor. Rebel muttered something that sounded profane while Anjeline wrestled with different escape plans flashing through her mind. The consequences that might arise if they retaliated. But in each scenario, she knew they weren’t faster than Nero’s sadistic magic. Faster than beasts.

  Then Rebel stepped forward.

  “Take me,” she told him. “Take all my magic. Just release her.”

  “No…” Anjeline rasped. “Don’t you dare.” Her cloak of heat spread around Rebel, and something in her swelled, so painful and protective she swayed under it, feeling like she might set ablaze from how unfettered it was. Now she realized why she’d been so drawn to Rebel from the first moment. It hadn’t been her feelings causing her essence to hum. It was Rebel’s own magic coursing beneath skin, pounding on her rib cage. Fighting itself within her. Solomon, her magic is buried deep for a reason.

  And she couldn’t let him see it.

  “Enough, Nero. It’s me you want but things have changed. We’re under the impunity of the Sun Court.”

  Nero had the gall to chuckle. “Have you forgotten already, Wishmaker? You know I play not by anyone’s rules but mine. And you are still mine.”

  “No one owns her.” Rebel pointed her switchblade. “Try it and you’ll see how much of a daughter I am.”

  “Child.” He shook his head. “Your adoration for the Jinn will be your death. Love is fleeting. The absence of it will suffocate you just as much as its presence. Learn to live without it, as I have. She’ll never choose you over being free.”

  Rebel flinched back.

  Heat seethed against Anjeline’s bonds, wanting to rip out his heart. If he ever had one. She would keep a level head, no matter how loud her insides howled for vengeance. She met his eyes, seeing only inhumanity there. “Darkness has devoured your soul.”

  “Darkness doesn’t equate to evil, as light doesn’t always equal goodness.”

  “Says the man who ripped out hearts.”

  Another wave of magic wrapped around Anjeline’s torso, making her helpless to do anything but obey, and she felt energy drain her core. Hands were on her then. She shivered against Rebel’s steadfast aura. As she intertwined her fingers with Rebel’s in that moment, she felt something more monumental than anything else. More than wishes. Than freedom.

  “Enough.” A hard fury descended upon Nero’s features as though the stench of their bond crawled over his skin. He peered at the alpha. “The vessel, now.”

  “Gladly.” Wulfram rumbled. “And the girl?”

  Nero smiled, looking at them as merely an unpleasant task to be done with. “Let’s see how strong their fight is.” His power slightly dimmed. With a simple snap of fingers, the vase could be in his possession, if he desired.

  But he had always liked a show.

  The Night Guard started forward, eyes glowing in warning. “Ready for a bit of huff and puff?” Wulfram growled and, in one leap, lunged in midair. Muscles rippled, boned-plates unfolded along his spine like a shield, and again, he was a hulking beast, barreling down at them.

  With rapid aim, Rebel whipped her switchblade into flight.

  It sliced through the air, glinting as it spun toward its goal. Never had Anjeline seen her throw her knives at a living target, so she was almost prouder than Rebel when the blade’s tip sank into Wulfram’s shoulder. He dropped to the floor in a howl, a crimson gash opened down his arm. But in mere seconds—skin knitted back together—and he was up again.

  “Cat?” Rebel asked.

  “Cat.” Anjeline nodded.

  A few lycans block
ed the door, while more lunged at them with jaws wide. Heat flashed in Anjeline’s core, channeling her rage into shape-shifting smoke. In a swirl, she altered into the only thing she could, bounding in feline form across wolfish shoulders. She leaped from one face to another, slashing away, intercepting them. Rebel kicked one in the muzzle and punched another in the nether region.

  A tidal wave of wolves came, one after the other.

  Anjeline’s small claws and teeth were no use. She swirled to smoke, rising into girl again, thinking of nothing else but to use her body as a shield. Hunching over, she wrapped herself around Rebel, covering them as much as she could with her physical form. Fangs and claws scraped, but the moment they pierced her skin, the slashes faded away.

  Whatever fog Piran had been in finally lessened. He yanked a pouch from his jacket and hurled it. A shower of powdery stars arched from the pouch, hanging in midair—the lycans advancing—before the powder hit them in a burst. The twin red wolves staggered, and two others were flicked back like bugs, writhing and clasping their flanks. Their contours altered in spasms from human to beast. Within the pandemonium, Anjeline felt Rebel being jerked out from under her. A hand snatched her satchel from her shoulder, nearly ripping it from its socket.

  “No!” Rebel cried, but it was too late.

  The bag was plucked from her possession. Husky forms galloped away, leaping back through the blown-out windows. A smile pulled at Nero’s mouth while, in his hand, the vase now glistened.

  Then he disappeared, taking it with him.

  As soon as he vanished, the tether the vessel allowed wretched at Anjeline’s essence. She shuddered, her physical form fading, pulled by the vase’s lure, tugging at her like a rubber band. “No, no, no!” Rebel scrambled, wrapping arms around Anjeline as if she could keep her there. “Take me with you. Take me inside the vase!”

  Anjeline shook her head, turning into a smoky haze. “Then we’ll both be trapped, Faddi…” She heard Rebel’s voice in her ear, but the pain was too great. Like she’d been speared in the back, the vase’s pull felt like a hundred knives that she was fighting against. She touched Rebel’s cheek with ghostly fingers, and one last look passed between them.