Tresia (Stone Mage Saga Book 3)

by Raven Whitney

  Her eyes far away, she said, “You never miss your heartbeat until it's gone.” Abruptly, she burst out laughing, “Well, we can agree on one thing: it's a good thing he didn't turn out to be a cannibal!”

  I laughed a little with her and nodded my head, but I couldn't shake what she said.

  Lexie changed the channel to some documentary on the impacts of Charlemagne for me and we settled into silence.

  Right as I was about to fall back to sleep another two hours later, Jack finally returned.

  “Buona sera, ladies. I see you both are awake now.” He carried a bulging paper bag in his arms that was filled to the brim with glass jars with plants, powders, and unidentifiable goos in them.

  “What took you so long?” I asked.

  He laughed, as though I'd charmed him with my concern. “I had to return our friend, take care of some errands, restock our pantry, and buy you ladies a present.”

  Lexie lifted a jar full of a putrid-looking green slime from one of the bags in his arms. “I'm pretty sure whatever this is doesn't go in the pantry.”

  “Not for food, but for other things.” He took the jar back from Lexie before she could open it.

  “Other things like what?” she asked, trying to take the jar back.

  He deftly spun around to dodge her grabbing hands. “Like spells,” he answered. “Which only I can do, so do not touch the ingredients you have no knowledge of.”

  She pouted, then perked up. “Wait a sec, did you say present?”

  Jack laughed and pulled a colorful box out of the big bag he was carrying. “It is for the both of you.”

  “It's a laptop!” Lexie shrieked and bounced up and down with joy. She flung her arms around Jack, then snatched the box out of his hands.

  She bounded to the couch and tore the box open to begin setting it up.

  I was both amused by the scene and a bit jealous of Jack at the same time. While I had a boatload of genera magics that I could use at will, we discovered shortly after coming here that my diluted mage blood wasn't capable of working with any raw magic.

  There was some irony in that. I couldn't even do the simplest of spells, but I could make zombies, something only two other mages in the whole world were strong enough to do: Octavius and a Chinese woman whose name I didn't know.

  Every mage I knew told me that the six magics the bracelet gave me, plus my own necromancy made me extraordinarily powerful, but from the way I saw it, it was a limited power. Since genera magics were like batteries, I could only use but so much of it before I ran out and had to wait for it to recharge.

  If I ran out of magic in battle now, I would be screwed. There was no way that slow, weak, unskilled me could compete with people who had superpowers and who'd been professional warriors for centuries.

  “I know it is hard to do now, but you need to get ready for bed.” He pointed to the spare bedroom. “We have a big day planned tomorrow.”

  With that, he took his big bag of clanging miscellany into his bedroom and shut the door behind him.

  A moment later, it reopened and he popped his head out. “Edgar,” he said, looking at me with a solemn weight in his eyes. “The man's name was Edgar.” He then retreated back into his room and shut the door again.

  Edgar. The man whose body was stolen from a morgue to sit in a sweltering shed for hours and be experimented on by me was named Edgar.

  It was such an ordinary name. When Lexie got up to go get something out of the bedroom, I reached for the laptop. Aw, Jack had gotten us a cellular WiFi card, too. That was sweet of him.

  Lexie sat back down next to me and peered over my shoulder. “Whatcha doing?”

  Her question was answered when she saw me type his name into the local newspaper's website. I clicked on the link to his obituary.

  Edgar was a deacon in his church and beloved family man who had left behind his wife of thirty years, two sons, and three grandchildren after a year-long struggle with lung cancer. Armed with his last name, I typed his name into an image search engine and found a picture from an article in the same newspaper about a new outreach program he was starting up. It showed Edgar with his wife and sons standing in a line, their arms around each others' shoulders in front of a building I assumed was their church. They looked so happily in love.

  It shone from the warmth in their eyes.

  I was reminded of a similar picture of my family. It was from the Christmas right after we'd gotten the news that Mom's cancer had gone into remission. She and my father stood in front of our house with Lexie and I on either side of them. It was one of my favorite pictures.

  I choked when I remembered that it used to sit in a frame on my bedside table before Duo had torched my childhood home to nothing but cinder.

  Clearing the lump from my throat, I exited the tabs and scooted the laptop over to Lexie. “Would you hack the hospital records, pretty please?”

  She slid it the rest of the way into her lap. “Are you sure? You need to get to bed.”

  “I just woke up from a nap. It'll be a while before I can go back to sleep.”

  She cast me a dubious glance, but nodded and began typing on the keyboard. It would take her a few minutes, so I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and pull my now mid-back length dark auburn waves back into a braid.

  I changed into some cotton shorts and camisole and went back out into the living room to check if she was done.

  My heart dropped like a cold stone into my stomach when I saw the shell-shocked expression in her dimly-lit face.

  Without saying a word, she got up and passed me the laptop. She avoided looking me in the eye.

  Numbness seeped through my body. How bad was she? We hadn't heard any news of how our families were doing since we left Newport.

  It took all my strength to accept that laptop and carry it into the bedroom. Whatever the news, I wanted to do this alone.

  The door clicked shut behind me and I shuffled into bed. Once I straightened the wrinkles from the blanket over my legs, I stared at the laptop, sitting as heavy as a small plastic boulder in my lap.

  Mom's cancer had returned nearly four years ago, but she had been holding strong with a combination of chemotherapy, radiation, and a daily infusion of my Grandma's special potions imbued with a necromantic magic that staved off death.

  However, when Lexie and I disappeared last October, her health had started to go downhill. Then the next month, her house burned down and when Grandma sacrificed her own life to save Lexie, Liam, and me in the battle against Duo, her mother vanished off the face of the Earth, too.

  Now having lost everyone she loved except her husband and the precious stock of leftover potions at the Philter that delayed the progression of her cancer, the cancer was sapping the life from her body.

  Part of me blamed myself. If I had never stopped at that garage sale, I would be curled up in my own bed right now with my parents sound asleep across the hall in the sleigh bed they'd bought when they got married. My grandma would still be alive and would probably be living in the apartment above the coffee shop again. She would still be alive to make the potions keeping Mom's cancer in check.

  She would have her life and her loved ones.

  But I had stopped. I bought a pretty box that had a pretty bracelet that changed the lives of me and everyone around me forever.

  Several minutes passed before I could muster the strength to lift the lid and read the latest entries on the hospital records that Lexie hacked for me.

  Immediately, my eyes locked onto the word “deceased.”

  She was gone. She'd died suddenly in the hospital only a week after we had fled Newport. The doctors noted her cause of death was sudden cardiac arrest.

  She had died of a broken heart.

  I slammed the lid shut and almost dropped it onto the floor.

  My chest was in a vise-grip as I curled into a tight little ball. I wrapped my arms around my chest to keep it from falling apart against the heaving sobs that wracked my chest. Mo
m— who had always loved me unconditionally from the day I was born, who always knew exactly what to say to make me feel better when I cried, who was there for me whenever I needed her with a warm hug and mug of hot cocoa—had died in pain, never knowing what happened to the people she loved most. She would never know that I was alive, that Lexie was mostly not dead, and that her mother had died a hero.

  All this time, I had held onto the tiny glimmer of hope that I would be able to fight my way out of this nightmare in time to see Mom again. Visions of holding her hand as she quietly passed on, secure in the knowledge that her surviving family was safe again, were gone now.

  I would never see my mother again.

  4

  I came to sometime later in bed to the sounds of whispering and a throbbing ache in my chest. Lexie was sobbing in the living room and Jack was trying to soothe her, murmuring unintelligible things in Italian.

  “Oh, God,” Lexie moaned. “What am I going to tell Constance when she wakes up?”

  Jack was quiet for a moment. “She has lost her mother. There is nothing you can tell her to make that pain go away. But what you can do is to cry together and to stay together. Your presence will be of more comfort than any words.”

  “We've known that this was coming for so long,” she said. “It doesn't feel real.”

  Jack didn't say anything as Lexie began to sob again.

  My mom had been more of a mother to Lexie than her own. Mom had been the one who made most of Lexie's birthday cakes over the years and even gave her the birds-and-bees talk. She had every right to grieve for her, too.

  My first instinct was to go to her and do exactly as Jack said: huddle up in a blanket together and cry. Lexie was right. It didn't feel real that she was dead, but the pain sure felt real.

  Every cell in my body ached.

  I would never get to see my mother again. Never again would I be able to hug her after a bad day. Never again would I be able to seek her advice when I had a problem. Never again would I hear her humming off-key to Beatles songs from the kitchen as she cooked dinner.

  She was really gone.

  Not only had she died a slow, painful death as her cancer sapped her of life, but she had also died in the worst emotional pain any parent could go through.

  When Lexie had been kidnapped, I'd left for the Arctic before dawn without leaving so much as a note. I simply hadn't thought to at the time, because I had planned on going home as soon as I got Lexie back.

  Now it was more than nine months later and as far as the human world was concerned, Lexie and I had vanished without a trace.

  And just before Jack took us here, her own mother had sacrificed her life to save us. Because she had died in battle and wasn't wearing the glamour she used to appear to age, Mom didn't even know that her own mother was dead. Everyone in her life except her husband had simply disappeared like smoke.

  I had seen people tortured— stabbed, flayed, burned. But she had died in the worst way. Alone.

  My chest had a smoldering crater where my heart should have been. I curled in a fetal position on the bed, biting my hand to keep from weeping aloud.

  With my mom gone, I could never go home again. My dad would surely hate me. He would probably blame me, too. With my and Lexie's disappearances, Mom's spirit had taken an enormous blow. Then she lost her own mother, and with her, the herbal potions infused with necromantic magic that was keeping her death at bay.

  Necromantic magic I had inherited from the maternal mage side of my family, but that I didn't know yet how to fully utilize. If she only could have survived just a little longer, maybe I would have learned how to make Grandma's tea.

  Maternal mage side.

  I bolted upright in bed.

  Before she died, Grandma told me that she prayed every day for Rhytha to bring forth Mom's dormant mage half when she died. She said there was a fifty-fifty chance that she would rise again as a mage.

  Mom could be alive!

  I stumbled out of bed and almost screamed my revelation to the rafters. But I stopped.

  If I said a word, Jack would insist on going alone, leaving Lexie and me here. That couldn't happen. If Mom was alive, she would be in a confused panic. Jack would be no help for her. Seeing me would calm her down… or really piss her off. Never let it be said of my mother that she had the patience of a saint and my disappearing act would put me in the doghouse for a thousand years.

  I had to go alone. With my necromancy, I could reach into her grave and see if she was okay.

  I had to see her, one way or the other. I had to know.

  It was a huge risk. As a high-profile missing person, it would make a big, loud mess if I were to be spotted. A loud enough mess that it could alert Octavius, leading to my inevitable torture and possible death. Or since Jack was still here, I would be tortured to death over and over again where nobody could save me.

  It was a risk worth taking for Mom.

  Sliding the window open, I carefully hopped out onto the ground in the backyard. The light from the shops and the road beckoned like never before. Creeping across the yard, I came to the edge of the barrier.

  How was I going to get across it? That barrier caught fireballs and sand-filled oil drums. There was no way that I could muster enough force to break through. And I couldn't use raw magic to open a hole like Jack did.

  I looked around desperately for anything that could help me. At any moment, Jack or Lexie peek into the bedroom to check on me.

  The jeep.

  When Jack was spelling it earlier, he must have added something to it to make it able to cross the barrier. Always in the past, whenever he was coming or going, he had to stop and use a spell to pass through. This afternoon, he just pulled in and out, only worrying about opening and closing the gate.

  Maybe that spell hadn't worn off yet.

  I opened the chain-link gate at the end of the driveway. I didn't have the keys to the car, but I climbed in anyway and took the parking break off and shifted it into neutral. Going around to the front bumper, I pushed as hard as I could, summoning concentrated columns of my air magic to help me.

  It began creeping backwards down the driveway. Hurrying, I leaped into the open driver's side door and waited as it so, so slowly rolled to the edge of the barrier. It picked up a tiny bit of speed as it went due to the slight slope.

  But it was veering the wrong direction! It was going to hit the corner of the gate! I tried to turn the wheel, but the old jeep didn't have power steering.

  I ducked impulsively down, though I knew it wouldn't do any good. It was going too slow to hurt me and ducking wouldn't stop Jack from finding me if the impending crash caused a commotion.

  But it didn't.

  It just bumped into the post, coming to a stop with one corner of the back end on either side of the barrier. Maybe that was enough.

  I climbed into the back of the jeep and slid across the seats— and across the barrier.

  I was home free!

  Jumping out of the jeep, I made a mad dash for the sidewalk and rushed to get as much distance as I could from the bungalow. It was late, but not so late that there wasn't a trickle of traffic. I didn't have any money to call a cab, I didn't know how to steal a car— though I made a mental note to learn how to do that— so I would have to hitchhike.

  But as the old phrase went, I had neither cash, nor grass, and I certainly wasn't paying with ass. So I was out of metaphorical gas.

  I might be able to use my telepathy like I did that one time with the maid in Liam's hotel, but that was a long shot. That was one of two genera magics that I couldn't practice with, so I still had no clue how to use it.

  It might have been a long shot, but it was my only one.

  A long-haul trucker could work, but surely in the time it took to get to Newport, they would notice me. A bus drove by.

  A bus would get me there. And the crowd of people on the bus would camouflage me, so getting busted would be less likely. So I had to get to a bus depot. />
  Ducking into a convenience store, I asked the clerk for directions. Sure enough, there was a bus station just outside of town. And it happened to be on her way home!

  The young, dark-skinned woman was kind enough to offer me a lift when she got off work in ten minutes if I helped her with the closing chores. So I swept that floor like the devil himself was chasing me until it was time to leave.

  She made nice small talk, but when she asked why I needed to catch a bus so late at night, I had no idea how to respond. I ended up telling her the truth. That my mother had passed away and I had to get home. I withheld the part where she might have un-died and become a mage.

  The woman, whose name was Tiffany, was sympathetic, having lost her father in a car accident a few years prior. She gave me a much-needed hug and offered her condolences as she dropped me off at the station.

  Since I didn't have any money, I skipped the building and went straight into the parking lot where the buses were loading and unloading.

  Walking along the line of parked buses, I read each of their intended destinations. There was one leaving for Providence that had a large group of people boarding. I could make it to Newport from Providence.

  Carefully, I slipped into step behind an older couple, hoping that anyone looking on would think I was their daughter. When it came time to walk by the driver, I crossed my fingers in my pocket and sent up a prayer that my crazy— and only— idea would work. I looked the older gentleman in the eyes and pushed a little at his mind as I said, “I'm with them.”

  He blinked hard and put a hand to his temple, “Go right ahead, miss.”

  My knees went weak for a moment. It had actually worked.

  I took an empty seat in the back corner of the bus and waited until the departure. I didn't know when it was scheduled to leave, but it had to be soon, since the bus was mostly full.

  Every time a shadow moved across the parking lot, every time I saw a dark-haired man in the depot, every unidentifiable sound made me jump out of my skin. Jack and Lexie had probably figured out I'd run away by now.