Red Magic: an Adult Dystopian Paranormal Romance: Sector 6 (The Othala Witch Collection)

by JC Andrijeski

  At the same time, I knew the reality of our situation was a lot more complex.

  For now, however, I was happy just not to be stuck in a monastery for most of my day, trying to get magics from my body and heart that didn’t live there in the first place. I was happy not to have people whispering about me constantly, or telling me what a failure I was, how useless I was to the Regent and my people, and how much dishonor I would bring upon my family when that fact became publicly known.

  Here, I might truly find a place for myself.

  Moreover, I might provide a real service to the people of District 6.

  A large part of me found peace in that prospect... even joy.

  Perhaps that was delusional, given that I had no choice but to do the work, but I felt suited to it, and for the first time in my life, I woke up eager to learn.

  Perhaps naturally, a quieter, yet persistent voice in my head was also troubled by the more aggressive nature of the magics I was learning to manifest. It was clear I was being trained for violence. I wasn’t sure how I might react to that violence if it were put directly in my path. After all, I’d spent the vast majority of my life being indoctrinated to avoid it.

  But (and a part of me felt guilt about this, too), I was also excited about the prospect. A large part of me wanted to see what I could do, how I would react, if I would be good at it.

  I looked forward to my time in the field to answer those questions.

  Even after that first day, I looked forward to it.

  Therefore, it wasn’t with a specific agenda in mind that I asked to see the fire lizards Yanna told me of that first morning I woke up here. Curiosity motivated me, yes, but not a real interest in solving their puzzle so I might escape. Most of my motivation stemmed from a will to understand where this new power I was discovering in myself truly came from.

  Part of me wanted to know everything I could about being a red witch.

  For Donal had been right, about that part at least.

  These were my people.

  This was my life.

  For better or for worse, I had come home.

  I DIDN’T ASK Donal to take me.

  I asked Evie, a red witch who’d been running courses alongside me for the previous few days. She beamed when I asked if she’d take me to see the fire lizards, and agreed at once. She appeared to be roughly my age, perhaps a year or two older, and had long black hair, a beautiful face with almond eyes, and pale skin. She looked like she could be related to one of those in the Water Market by human ethnicity, but unlike them, she lived in clean air and not underground or by the filth of the canal docks.

  She was like a perfect vision of how they could be, if the city’s conditions were easier.

  Evie explained to me that she was recovering from an injury she got in the last big battle against ravagers in the north. Luna wanted to train her alongside me to ease Evie back into the physical part of her regimen. That might have been insulting to me, under different circumstances, but here I took it only as unadorned truth.

  I was starting from the ground up, so it was difficult to feel any arrogance as I learned my way around my body’s abilities, more or less for the first time.

  Evie showed me a thick bandage over her back and side that she explained covered a deep bite wound and a claw mark from a ravager who jumped down on her from a tree in the midst of an ambush. She was nonchalant about it, even bored-sounding, but clearly the hampered mobility issues stemming from her injuries annoyed her.

  She told me she was itching to get “back in the game,” as she termed it.

  It was both fascinating and intimidating to hear her talk.

  She spoke of the ravagers in the north growing increasingly cunning.

  According to her, their red magic strategists increasingly had to approach those ravagers as they would primitive human beings. Evie told me about one “pack” of ravagers in particular that acted strangely smarter than any they had encountered thus far. They feared the creatures were evolving in some way, and that these behaviors might spread, which could pose a real threat to the kingdom, if it were allowed to happen.

  Evie told me that oddly clever strain of ravagers was even beginning to “recruit” other ravagers to deliberately grow their pack, something they’d never seen ravagers do before, either. Moreover, as their core pack grew, they began to show signs of strategic thinking and organization that could be alarming in its sheer complexity and foresight.

  I was so lost in listening to her talk, I didn’t notice Donal following us at first.

  For a good chunk of that day, he’d been in another part of the training fields. I’d glimpsed him several times at a distance. One of those times, he’d been running and firing a long gun mounted on a swivel attached to his arm and shoulder. On another occasion, I saw him fighting another red witch in a dusty ring, each of them wielding what looked like a flaming sword, although those flames were clearly of magic as well.

  I fought to ignore him both times, but I admit, it was difficult.

  Every day, I found myself looking for him on the courses.

  Now, walking with Evie, when I happened to glance over my shoulder to the path behind us through the trees, I saw Donal again.

  He strode quietly but made no attempt to hide, his guns back securely in their holsters, his fingers hooked casually in his belt as he walked.

  From the wary look on his face, I could tell he wasn’t sure if I would welcome his presence there, but from the set of his jaw, I suspected he’d argue the point if I tried to order him away.

  Instead I chose to go back to ignoring him.

  I’d been attempting to do that a lot over the previous week.

  We were still inside the high, black walls of the Black Fortress, but from the white-sand path and the tall palm trees filling the spaces to either side of where we walked, we might have been in a tropical jungle.

  Birds called to one another in the trees overhead, and I watched them flit from trunk to trunk, hopping about the area as if playing their own game of tag, or hide and seek. I’d heard at least one monkey in the twenty or so minutes since we’d left the main exercise field as well, and watched blue and green lizards climb the sloping trunks with languid ease.

  Red flowers bloomed from bushes growing between the palm trees, and I saw bees pollinating those as well.

  I still marveled at the sheer expanse that lived inside these walls.

  It would take me days, possibly even weeks, to explore it all; far longer than it would take to cover all areas of the Regent’s palace. Luna told me they had a second compound just west of here as well, which is where they raised most of their livestock used for food and other necessities, like leather, and even bone for some of the projectile weapons. Since the ravagers wouldn’t suffer any creature to live for long outside the protected walls, they had a contingent of warriors whose sole job it was to protect their livestock from harm.

  “You’ll fit in great here,” Evie was saying now, pulling my attention back to her when she grinned at me. “We weren’t sure, you know. I’ve never heard of anyone starting this kind of training at your age. Most of us were handed knives by the time we were six. But all of that work with those white monks seems to have improved your concentration quite a lot... even if they had you concentrating on all of the wrong things.”

  I smiled, but my mind turned over her words.

  I found comfort in the thought that all of that work at the monastery might not be wasted.

  “...Luna thinks you’re going to be one of our best fighters yet,” Evie added. “You’ve got all of them excited, and trying to decide how best to train you up, and how quickly they can push you out in the field. I overheard Luna talking to Cari while you were running that last course today, even. They want you integrated into a unit as soon as possible. Donal’s already requested you in his, of course...”

  I flinched, turning to her, but Evie went on as if she hadn’t noticed.

  “...but they’ll probab
ly refuse him, at least at first. He does strictly front-line work, dangerous stuff, so I doubt they’ll want you there to start. But he’ll likely get his way eventually, if you prove yourself in the field for a few months and rack up some real kill numbers. A lot of people here are still in awe of your bloodline, you know... even with you being part white witch. They say you’re Ilric’s Blood. That means something to us. It’s royalty here, far more than any Regent’s blood you might carry...”

  I felt my face heat, even as I snuck a look over my shoulder at Donal, who still walked behind us with silent, casual strides. He was a good dozen yards behind us still, and currently gazing off into the trees as though he scarcely noticed us.

  I strongly got the impression he was listening, however.

  “...You’ve clearly made an impression on at least one red warlock,” Evie said then, grinning as she nudged me playfully with an elbow. “He’s getting ribbed a lot, for being so moonstruck, but being Donal, he doesn’t give a toss, of course. He can be pretty single-minded about things. Stubborn. Even more’n most red warlocks.”

  I glanced at her again, feeling my face heat.

  Annoyed in spite of myself, although not really at the dark-haired witch at my side, I spoke louder, for his benefit more than hers.

  “They’re misinterpreting his motives, is all,” I said, my voice a touch colder. “You’re not seeing the moon in his eyes... you’re seeing guilt, for he worked with my mother to send me here, and lied to me frequently and mightily to do it. I suppose I should blame myself for that... for being so stupid and naive as to want to help him.” Feeling my jaw harden, I didn’t look back as I shrugged. “In truth, I suspect he still works for my mother. That’s likely the real reason he’s following me around, not due to any interest in me as a person. Either way, it likely suits him for all of you to believe otherwise, which is likely why he doesn’t argue the rumors.”

  I didn’t look back that time.

  Regardless, I felt a cloud of anger expand off Donal.

  I felt it so strongly in my chest and belly, I had to fight not to turn my head. His emotions hit at me like a tangible force, causing the hairs to rise on the back of my neck, my muscles to clench, my breath to shorten.

  It wasn’t fear that struck me, though.

  Rather, I felt a flicker of guilt. My own, that time.

  I wondered if he might say something to me, given how strongly he felt.

  But he didn’t.

  Evie chuckled, glancing back over her shoulder, presumably at Donal himself.

  “Keep telling yerself that, Maia,” she said, after another beat of staring at him. She grinned, looking back at me. “If you’re trying to get ‘im riled up, yer doing a right good job of it, though. I suppose ‘tis good for him to wallow in penance for a bit. We all know what he did t’ya, while he was in that place. We know why, too... and that he left his sister behind for ye, even though she’s the only reason he agreed to that horrible witch’s deal in the first place.”

  I shook my head, feeling my face heat more.

  “I don’t want to talk about this any more, Evie.”

  “You don’t?” she said innocently. “Just a minute ago, ye seemed quite willing to talk on it... and quite opinionated on the subject, as well.”

  My voice and jaw grew firmer still. “I know nothing about his sister but the lies he told me... so I don’t want to hear the truth of it, or what he’s presenting as truth, from someone else. If he wants me to feel for what he did there, he needs to address me himself.”

  Evie shrugged, her eyes thoughtful.

  “Fair enough,” she conceded. “And sorry if the rest of us seem a tad insensitive. But you must understand, for the rest of us, ‘tis funny because it’s Donal you’ve made star-struck. Most of us thought he’d end up married to his sword... or perhaps a ravager, given how he spends the majority of his time obsessing on how to kill ‘em.”

  When I scowled at her, she only grinned wider.

  “It’s new for us, you see,” she added cheerfully. “To witness him focused on an actual person... much less an orphan half-breed witch he kidnapped from the white palace, on orders from her own mother, no less.”

  I didn’t answer, but felt a harder flush of my own anger that time.

  Evie must have noticed. Shoving playfully at my shoulder, she glanced at Donal and then at me, and laughed again.

  “Yer quite the pair,” she joked. “I’m beginning to see the similarities there, myself.”

  I tried to decide whether I should answer, either to her directly or indirectly to Donal. I knew it was childish to dig at him in such a way, but since he didn’t seem to be talking to me face to face, whatever his annoyances with me, I couldn’t quite bring myself to attempt the same with him. Maybe I wasn’t ready to be rejected again. Or lied to.

  Before I could finish the train of thought, I grew distracted once more by our surroundings.

  We’d finally come to the end of the path.

  Once we had, I forgot about Donal altogether.

  Chapter 15

  FIRE LIZARDS

  THE WHITE SAND path gave over to black rock.

  The same black, glass-like rock as the fortress’ walls.

  The trees ended. The air grew hotter, seemingly the moment we left the white sand. I found myself standing a half-dozen yards away from a crevasse in the planet’s crust, a long narrow cut that looked like a burn scar, or a gash in a hunk of black coal.

  As we walked closer, the heat from that gash grew more intense.

  The volcanic stone shimmered like glass, reflecting sunlight, even as it melded into light-colored stones at higher points in the canyon walls.

  The air got wetter too, just like that temple under the palace.

  I’d learned in history class about the relatively short span of years where volcanos erupted madly all around the world, including not far from District 6. Those volcanos were blamed for a long period of war, along with dislocation and famine as crops were decimated by poison gases, and the sun became invisible due to ash clouds that circled Othala for decades.

  Some blamed the rise of the ravagers on that same seismic anomaly, although I’d heard it happened years before the ravagers came. Other stories existed to explain the ravagers’ rise anyway, everything from disease to medical experiments to mutant plant life growing in the heads of some humans, morphing them into a sort of hybrid species.

  Like much of what occurred before the ravagers came, that part of history was murky at best, with much of the knowledge hovering somewhere between fact and myth.

  Evie walked cautiously to the edge of that hole in the world, and peered over.

  “You can see them down there,” she said, pointing down. “There’s a lot of them. Look.”

  Already, her forehead had started to sweat.

  I jointed her at the lip of the opening.

  Checking my footing, I looked straight down. As soon as I had, a blast of wet heat hit me from the current ascending from below.

  The crevasse didn’t go nearly as deep as I’d expected.

  I could see the bottom, or what I expected to be the bottom, a mere twenty or so yards below where we stood. I’d expected something endless, I suppose, or perhaps a glimpse into the middle of the planet’s core. Instead, I found myself trying to make sense of bright red, sinuously writhing shapes I saw on the black rocks below.

  Another wave of heat came up from the crack in the world as I did, making me gasp from the metallic, wet smells that filled my lungs.

  Then I realized I recognized those shapes.

  They weren’t molten lava, or even some kind of iridescent plankton, shining from the slick, water-sheened rocks

  They were the lizards themselves.

  Black tongues flickered out from long muzzles as they writhed over and around one another in the pit. They were large, although it was difficult to say how large from this distance. Most were easily the size of a good-sized shepherd dog, though, like the one I’d seen
in the Water Market. Some of the larger ones might even have been the size of a small pony.

  That didn’t include the snaking tails, of course, which coiled and wound around one another and flicked against the black glass walls in sinewy silence. Those made the lizards a lot longer, since some of their tails were twice the length of their bodies.

  I watched them, enthralled.

  Before that precise moment, I don’t think I’d ever seen anything so captivating.

  I could not quite believe they were real.

  Their skins glowed red-gold, shimmering with heat; their coal-black eyes reflected the same from one another’s skins, their black tongues making shadows in the light. They climbed over one another, coiled around one another, slept with jaws resting on one another’s backs and curved tails, walked on one another, nudged one another with noses and claws.

  “They’re beautiful,” I murmured. You’re so beautiful, I thought at them. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful as you are... never.

  All of the motion at the bottom of the pit abruptly stopped.

  As one, they all looked up, gazing at the lip of the crevasse.

  It looked almost like they were staring at me.

  “What did you do?” Evie looked at me, frowning. Fear trembled her voice. “They’ve never done that before! What did you do? Did you do something?”

  I couldn’t make myself look away from that sea of reflecting black eyes. Still staring down at them, I shook my head.

  Evie caught hold of my arm, giving me a single, rough shake. “What did you do?”

  “I did nothing,” I protested, finally turning my head to meet her gaze.

  She was breathing harder, her eyes wide in her face. Both of us looked down once more, and the fire lizards stared back. My tongue felt numb; I didn’t quite believe my own words. But what had I done, really? What possible harm could I have committed, in a few stray thoughts?

  I’d told them they were beautiful. They were beautiful.

  Like ancient creatures filled with light.

  Below us, the silence broke.