Grave Destiny

by Kalayna Price

  Basmoarte was a wasting disease. I’d never known its name, but I’d seen it before. A long time ago.

  It had killed my mother.

  Chapter 15

  “Get back.” I whispered the words, not trusting myself to speak any louder. The panic gnawing at the edges of Rianna’s spell was very close to taking over again. Half of me wanted to let it. If I gave in to the panic, I wouldn’t have to think anymore. But that would be giving up, and damn it, I didn’t want to die. Not now. Not this way.

  “It’s only contagious through magical contact. And only among the fae,” Holly said, reaching out like she would take my hand again.

  I pulled my arms closer to my chest, out of her reach.

  “I’m about to use magic, so step back. Just in case.”

  No one moved.

  “Al, it is spreading really fast. Faster than it should. The healers weren’t sure why,” Caleb said.

  “I have some theories on that,” Rianna said. “According to the healers, the more magic an infected fae uses, the faster they succumb. Stop using all magic, and it can be managed for a short while. But, Al, your magic never turns off. You are constantly touching multiple planes, which is why you see ghosts and collectors and stuff.”

  Caleb nodded. “You use magic to not use more magic.”

  Which meant my magic would literally eat me alive, and fast. But did it also increase the risk to those around me, if the planes were converging through me? I had to actively use magic to make a ghost visible to others, but if I was touching the ghost and a chair, the ghost could touch the chair with no extra magical expenditure on my part.

  “Step back,” I said again.

  “Alex—” Holly started, but I shot her a glare.

  I didn’t have a lot of time. I was exhausted, dizzy, and very close to freaking out again. If I didn’t try to fight this thing now, I wouldn’t get another chance.

  “Go.”

  Holly stared at me for half a heartbeat more. Then she pushed to her feet, dragging Caleb with her. Rianna hesitated a moment longer but finally stood as well, retreating to the far end of the tent. I turned to Falin. He hadn’t budged. When I looked at him, he only lifted an eyebrow, as if daring me to try to make him move. He was at the foot of the bed, and considering the size of the tent, he wasn’t that much closer than anyone else in the small space. He was no more at risk than the others, but would I put them all at risk if I reached for my magic? Another look at him told me he wasn’t moving, and he sure as hell wouldn’t leave the tent if I asked.

  Now, or never.

  I closed my eyes and focused on my shields. The pain in my head doubled, and I swayed where I sat. I paused, breathing deep, trying to get my equilibrium back. When the dizziness passed, I peeled open my shields another inch, aware of every crack, of the cost of touching my magic. The hole was a sliver only large enough to let the smallest fingers of magic through. My head throbbed, darkness pressing on me, and I panted with the strain. I pried my shields open a sliver more, and nearly collapsed. Was it enough? It had to be enough, I couldn’t manage much more. I opened my eyes.

  It was enough.

  I could see the spells tied into the charms my friends had made, the thin Aetheric energy in colors each preferred, but more than that, I could see the deeper pattern of the magic under my skin. While the purplish network of magic was visible on my skin, so much more was visible with my shields open. The magic was dark, a network of poison and sickness deep under my flesh. But I could see it.

  And what I could see, I could touch.

  I held up one hand and poked at one of the trails of sickly magic in my littlest finger. It moved slow as molasses, the effort making my stomach clench painfully.

  I gasped, doubling over in pain, but the magic moved, peeling up, out of my skin.

  Lifting the string of makeshift charms around my neck, I selected a flat rock the size of my palm and attempted to push the tainted magic into the stone. The black tendril obeyed, but when I released it, the magic wiggled back out of the stone, remaining firmly affixed to my finger. I selected a pinecone next. The fouled tendril of magic seemed more accepting of the pinecone, but try as I might, it wouldn’t stick to it. I frowned.

  “I need a receptacle.”

  Falin stepped forward. “What kind?”

  I stared at where the magic dangled from the tip of my pinky. It undulated, trying to get back under my skin. It wasn’t going into anything inanimate. It was a wasting magic that wanted to sap life.

  “Something alive,” I whispered, hating it even as I said it. “Something that it will be okay if it dies. A tree?”

  No one said anything. Herbs were picked and used in magic all the time. Wood was a common charm component, and a tree or at least a branch was obviously killed for that. But using something still living, knowing the magic would kill it? That definitely fell into the category of gray magic, if not black. And yet no one protested.

  Falin gave one sharp nod, turning toward the tent flap.

  “I’ll come with you,” Caleb said, following him out.

  That was good. Caleb was a greenman. He’d make sure whatever living tree Falin brought back was only a tree, not a sleeping ent or the home of a nymph at the festival.

  After they left, I peeled off the spelled disk Rianna had pressed into my forehead to calm me. I didn’t need it anymore. Now that I had a plan, I was in control of my own panic. I focused on the sickly magic. My shoulder was by far the worst part of the infection, the magic festering deep inside me, far too close to my heart. The only other place it had taken deep hold was my hand, in particular my fingertips. The tendrils in my face and the ones trying to grow down my chest were the most loosely connected. Those pulled free slowly, but without much digging with my magic. I was able to peel the fouled magic down, over my jaw and down my neck one agonizing inch at a time.

  When I reached my shoulder, the process became much more difficult. I pushed, tugged, and pulled, gaining millimeters before having to stop to let the room stop spinning. I passed out twice, waking to find Holly dabbing my face with a wet cloth. I switched gears and focused on my hand instead, leaving the shoulder for last.

  My fingers were nearly as bad. It was slow work. I kept having to stop to rest. More than once my stomach clenched so hard I thought I was going to lose all the festival food I’d eaten the night before. I’d managed to free my hand up to my wrist by the time Falin and Caleb returned, a four-foot sapling, roots and all, carried in a blanket between them.

  They set the baby tree down in front of me without a word. Caleb backed away, but Falin moved toward the bed.

  “Don’t,” I said, throwing out my clean arm to halt him. I didn’t know what everyone else could see, but in my vision, the sickly magic was dangling from my wrist like a sleeve of writhing, poisonous snakes. It kept trying to crawl back under my skin, and I was afraid it would do the same to any fae who got close enough for the magic to touch.

  I scooted to the edge of the bed and looked at the little sapling. I didn’t know enough about trees to tell more than that it was an evergreen. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to it, reaching out and wrapping the fingers of my bad arm around the trunk. It wasn’t a thinking being, so no debt opened between us. That didn’t mean I didn’t regret what I was about to do.

  I grabbed a handful of the dangling magic and pushed it against the trunk. The magic didn’t want to leave me, but I shoved it under the bark of the tree, and unlike with the stone and pinecone I’d attempted earlier, this time it found something to latch onto. It didn’t pour into the tree, but it didn’t slide back out either and I was able to detach a fistful of tainted tendrils at a time. The more of the sickly magic the tree absorbed, the stronger I felt and the easier it became to rip it out of me.

  Not that it was easy.

  Sweat dripped down every inch of me by the time I had cleansed the
fouled magic from the tips of my fingers to my elbow. I had to stop to let the room stop spinning several times as I purged the magic as far as my shoulder. And then there was the shoulder itself. The infection had tunneled into the weak parts in my soul and it did not want to let go. Trying to cleanse the infection was a demented dance of one step back every time I took two forward because I had to exert magic to excise the infection, but the more magic I used, the more the fouled magic spread.

  I wasn’t sure how much time I spent pulling and pushing the dark magic from me into the tree. It felt like an eternity, but finally I collapsed onto the bed. I was sweating, shaking, and exhausted, but feeling better than when I’d woken. The headache was gone, and having my shields cracked no longer made the room spin. That had to be a good sign.

  From where I lay on the bed, I glanced at the sapling. The branches were twisted, the bark blackened, and most of the needles had fallen to the ground. It was, without a doubt, dead.

  “Is it done?” Rianna asked.

  I pushed up to a sitting position. After wiping sweaty curls from my forehead, I nodded. It was done. For now. I looked around for the pitcher Rianna had poured from earlier. I needed water.

  “So . . . you’re cured?” Holly asked.

  She sounded so very hopeful. I glanced at my hands. I’d gotten all of the magic that had already fouled and turned against my body, but that was the symptom, not the cause. The poisoned magic would spread again.

  “What she did,” Dugan said, his voice expressionless, “was the equivalent of eating her own hand to avoid starving to death.”

  Oh, what a lovely euphemism.

  “I’d equate it more to lancing a wound to drain the infection,” I said, and Dugan frowned at me.

  “You stopped the immediate emergency, but you only bought time. Considering how much magic you used to do it, I doubt you bought yourself much before it tries to consume you again.”

  “You think I shouldn’t have tried it?”

  “I think it was brilliant and saved your life,” he said, which didn’t actually answer the question, but yay for being brilliant. “If you’re vigilant at purging yourself like that, you might be the first fae who doesn’t waste away in a mere matter of weeks. Then again, the last time I saw basmoarte in Faerie, it was not near so aggressive.”

  Lucky me. I’d prolonged my death sentence. But at a cost. I glanced at the twisted and dead sapling. “I’d deforest Faerie.”

  If I killed that many living things with dark magic, what would I become? Would I still really be living, or me?

  “If the symptoms can be managed . . . can she heal?” Holly asked. She was ever an optimist. Of course, it was her never-give-up attitude that had gotten her to being an assistant district attorney, and keeping that insane schedule despite getting exposed and addicted to Faerie food. “I mean, Alex, you equated it to draining a wound. You do that so that the wound can heal, right?”

  “I don’t know.” It had been pure desperation that I’d even tried to remove the magic poisoning me. I knew almost nothing about basmoarte. My mother had faded quickly, or at least it had seemed so to me. I’d been five at the time. She ended up in a human hospital with the doctors bewildered by her disease. That had been the first time I’d met Death. I’d begged him to leave her. I was so sure she’d get better. She just kept wasting away without dying until I’d let her go. She had never started to recover, not even with extra time. Of course, she also hadn’t had the magic poisoning her removed. If I could keep draining the poison, could I recover?

  I looked to Falin first. He looked less ready to kill something now, but there was still a raw edge to him that told me he had no answers. I looked to Dugan next.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve never heard of anyone surviving basmoarte, but then, I’ve never heard of anyone doing quite what you just did. At the rate it was spreading, I would have given you hours. Now?” He shrugged. “Healers have tried to repair the damage in the past, but they can’t rip out the poisoned magic. Maybe, given time, your magic will stop warping.”

  We were all silent for a moment, considering that. A vague “maybe” wasn’t exactly hopeful, but it also wasn’t a definite “no.”

  “If basmoarte hasn’t been seen in centuries, how did Alex get infected?” Rianna asked, her hands twisting awkwardly in front of her. For the first time I realized her ever-present barghest wasn’t at her side—neither in his typical big black dog form, nor in the man form I’d only seen twice.

  “I’ve seen it,” I said, and you could have heard a snowflake hit the ground in the tent. “My mother died of it.”

  Caleb cocked his head to the side. “You’re sure?”

  I nodded. The black lesions. The purple veining. It was seared into my childhood memories.

  “So, I’m guessing no one else saw a flash of red light right before I passed out?” I asked, glancing around. I was met with confusion and curiosity. “I think I know how I was exposed.”

  I explained how the golden-cloaked fae had pulled out his chunk of rock, and the flash of light I’d seen, followed by twisting darkness. Falin’s daggers materialized in his hands, but Dugan only shook his head at my explanation.

  “I saw him, and the stone you mentioned. I was watching him because he’d clearly been following Lunabella. I never saw the stone change from its yellow color.” Dugan tapped a finger against his sharp cheekbone in thought before shaking his head again. “And that could not be the source of the basmoarte. While highly contagious, it is very specific in how it spreads. When a fae’s magic touches an infected fae’s magic, a wound in the magic opens. It is said to be painful. Noticeable. And that spot in the magic is where the infection will spread from.”

  I lifted my hands. The smallest blot of blue was blooming on the tip of my pointer finger. It was barely the size of a pinhead. It looked like I’d touched something.

  Like Sleeping Beauty pricking her finger on a spinning wheel.

  That thought stopped me. Not the Sleeping Beauty part—I was no princess. The pricked finger part.

  “Oh,” I said, my head snapping up. “Then, maybe I know. When I reach out with my grave magic, I imagine it as an extension of my hand, reaching down into the corpse. When I tried to raise Kordon, I received what I can only describe as a magical prick to the finger.” I held out the hand with the small dark spot of poisoned magic.

  There was a stunned moment, and then Falin moved. He had a dagger out and at Dugan’s throat before anyone could react. Rianna yelped, ducking out of the tent. Caleb pulled Holly behind him, backing away with her until they reached the tent flap as well. His gaze met mine before he disappeared, and I saw the brief moment of hesitation, the torn loyalty wishing he could get me out of the tent as well, and then he was guiding her out and ducking out behind her.

  “It was your fae. Was this your doing?” Falin asked between clenched teeth, his dagger not moving.

  “Peace, Knight,” Dugan said, lifting his own hands, palms out and empty. “The sun hasn’t set on the shortest day yet. The truce still holds all of Faerie.”

  “Technically your court was only welcomed if you meant no harm,” Falin said, and the heat of anger I’d seen in him had turned cold. It was by far his more deadly condition.

  Dugan laughed, but one of his hands dropped, inching toward his own sword. “What is your plan, Knight? If you can slice my throat and Faerie allows it, you will assume that means I meant harm? Isn’t that rather like when humans tossed suspected witches in lakes? If they floated, they fished them out and burned them. If they drowned, they deemed them innocent.”

  “I’m willing to take that chance,” Falin replied, but he didn’t move, keeping the blade right at Dugan’s throat. I wasn’t sure if he was hesitating, or if Faerie wouldn’t let him finish the movement.

  “Stop, both of you,” I said, pushing up off the bed. I was more pleased
than I should have been when my legs held. “Falin, why are you threatening Dugan?”

  “Because it all ties back to him. His fae. His dagger. A shadow minion watching the ritual. He keeps insisting he wishes to prevent war, but maybe it was never about war. It was all a setup to ensure you would use your magic on a corpse infected with basmoarte. He approached you to raise the shade before we even knew about the deaths. The scene made no sense so that even if you hadn’t agreed to his request, the queen would have made you raise the shades. The ultimate result was that you would be infected.”

  “I think that we have all been nicely played in someone else’s game,” Dugan said, frowning. “I swear on the very essence of Faerie that I mean Alexis no harm. In fact, her continued survival can only benefit me.”

  The two men stared at each other, but after a moment, Falin lowered his dagger and stepped back.

  “I think,” Dugan said slowly, as if afraid his words might trigger another reaction, “that we might have been approaching the scene incorrectly. We assumed the murders were committed to start a war between our courts, or perhaps the staging was to cover a personal grudge, but I have to agree with you that it appears to have been a trap for Alexis. Possibly it served as more than one of those scenarios, but surely the last because Kordon did not have basmoarte before his disappearance.”

  “I have heard rumors,” Falin said, his voice low, dangerous. “That basmoarte had been resurrected and weaponized.” He looked at Dugan. It wasn’t accusatory, not entirely at least; it was more of an inquiry. If anyone had information on such rumors, the Prince of Shadows and Secrets should.