Tresia (Stone Mage Saga Book 3)

by Raven Whitney

  I dragged myself out of bed and put three frozen sandwich pockets in the toaster oven. The smell made me nauseous, but I had to eat something.

  I realized I was alone in the house and nothing but surf sounded through the open windows. Looking around the bungalow, I didn't see anybody, so I ventured out into the front yard to search.

  Nobody was in the front, but I saw Jack doing something in the back to the jeep. No Lexie, though.

  Maybe she was in the bathroom? But why would she be there?

  No Lexie in the bathroom.

  “Hey,” she said, touching me on the back as a ding sounded from the kitchen. “I was looking for you. You've got to eat something.”

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Just really drained, is all.” She ran a hand down her face.

  “Not feeling… rotty?” I hesitated to ask, but it was kind of important.

  “Not yet, but I don't want to find out what happens if we wait any longer.” She turned me around and marched me to the kitchen.

  I dutifully scarfed my frozen pizza pockets.

  “How are you holding up?” Her eyes seemed to stare right through me.

  I stopped chewing. “Still alive.”

  She nodded, grief and sympathy in her face. “Do you want to take the day off? I think Jack has some big exercise planned, but I can ask him if he's okay with waiting until tomorrow.”

  Shaking my head, I responded, “No, I think I need to stay focused on training.” I had to do something. If I sat around this house for a whole day with nothing to do but think, I would go mad. No, I needed to do something so exhausting that it would keep my mind busy all day and knock me out the minute we finish. “How about you?”

  Lexie took a deep breath. “I'm doing better than I thought I would be.” She leaned against the dinner table while I polished off the last of my breakfast. “I guess I've been braced for this for so long, that I can take the hit.”

  I furrowed my brows, but had my mouth full.

  She dropped her head and admitted, “I've kind of known for a while now that we were never going to get to go home again.” She looked back up at me and saw what must have been hurt and confusion on my face. “Think about it: when Grandma Gwen passed away, she stopped making the potions that were keeping your mom alive. She probably had a stash of extras, but once that ran out…” she trailed off.

  “I knew there was no way that this was going to blow over in time and going to visit would just put her in danger.” Lexie was quiet, like she was confessing to a crime.

  “It's okay.” I wrapped her in an embrace to take that sad look off her face. She hadn't done anything wrong. “That just shows you were thinking more clearly than me.”

  I released her. “How did you guys find me, anyway?”

  Lexie gave me a hint of a smile. “It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where you went. We started following you as your bus left the depot. Good job with using your telepathy, by the way.”

  They'd been on my tail for that long and I hadn't even noticed? “And at the cemetery?”

  “We were hiding in Mr. Fullerton's back yard, keeping an eye on you through a hole in his fence.”

  They were twenty feet away the whole time and I didn't notice a thing. “And you didn't come?”

  “I wanted to go sit with you, but Jack said we should give you some space.”

  “And what did you do to my dad?” Maybe it was just a spell that had caused him to disown me?

  “Jack brought along an area glamour and cast it as soon as we got there,” she explained, then went quiet again. “Nobody heard you scream, either.”

  That was a good thing. “It would have been bad if somebody had called the cops. Or worse, if Mrs. Fullerton's Pomeranian woke up.”

  Lexie laughed. “No magic could have saved you from getting arrested, then. That poofy monster would have woken up half the city.”

  “Topolina,” Jack said, coming in the back door. “How are you doing this afternoon?”

  “Breathing,” I answered. “That's the best I can do.”

  “Would you like to train today?” he asked. In the entire time since we'd agreed to work with him, he had never asked if we wanted to train. We had no choice, rain or shine, sickness or health, miserable cramps or not.

  I nodded. “I have to do something.” Even though I had no light at the end of this tunnel anymore, that didn't mean I could stop. If I stopped, I died.

  Jack nodded, grabbing a pack of string cheese out of the fridge. “Are you ready to go?”

  “Just as soon as I shower.” It had also been two days since I'd bathed last.

  “Which means you stay here,” Lexie said to Jack, herding him to the sofa.

  I went to grab a change of clothes and my shower caddy from the bedroom before going into the back yard.

  It had made me profoundly uncomfortable and paranoid to be nude out in the open the first time I had bathed in the unenclosed beach shower. If it weren't for the barrier that acted almost like an invisible two-way mirror, the tourists on either side of the house and the cars and businesses on other side of the street fifty yards away would be able to see my naked behind.

  Now I could strip down and only worry about Jack— who had no concept of personal boundaries— barging in to get something out of the shed again. And I had quickly learned to keep a knife in my shower caddy, just in case he was stupid enough to make that mistake twice.

  I hurried through my shower, shaved as quickly as I could without cutting myself, and dressed to go inside.

  “Are we ready?” Jack asked from where he and Lexie were watching some melodramatic docudrama.

  I nodded and they followed me back outside.

  Jack walked to the parking pad by the shed where his rusted, open top jeep sat under a metal-roofed car port that kept the seagulls from pooping in it.

  “What are you doing?” Lexie asked.

  “I am going to finish re-warding the car,” he answered as though she'd asked a stupid question.

  “Which means what?” she continued. He'd explained a bit about magic to us, but once we figured out that I had virtually no ability to work with it in its raw state, he hadn't spent much time teaching either of us about it.

  “A ward is a protection against something.” He stopped once he reached the car and turned to us. “There are many types of wards. The kind I am using is like one of the wards that is on the house— it prevents anyone from scrying our location.”

  “Scrying?” I asked. That was a word I hadn't heard before.

  “To scry is to use magic to attempt to divine information, normally the location of a particular person or thing.” He snapped his fingers in a lightbulb moment. “Like a crystal ball. That is one tool used in scrying.”

  “Oh!” Lexie cried as the puzzle pieces of knowledge he fed us were starting to form a bigger picture in her mind.

  “I get it.” I nodded my head.

  “The warding spell I am placing on the car will hide us, so long as we do not go more than around thirty meters away from it. The wards I used yesterday were improvised, but these I can take the time to do right.”

  “That makes sense,” Lexie said. “Now get to it.”

  Jack rolled his eyes and turned back to the car. “Keep quiet.”

  He took a deep breath and slowly raised his hand above his head. In the bright light of day, it was only until it was raised above the shadow line that I could see his fingertips glowing with a soft golden light.

  In a sweeping motion, he brought his hand back down. He was silent as he slowly began to walk around the car, then, still waving his right hand through the air. Like a child's sparkler, a trail of yellow light remained in the wake of his hand, only it didn't fade as he circled the jeep.

  His glowing fingertips swiftly darted through the air, elegantly weaving together intricate characters— some of which I had seen somewhere before— in a luminous script that his closed eyes could not see.

  Once
he had navigated the full three hundred sixty degrees without stumbling over his own feet a single time, the ring of script was complete. For a second, it glowed brighter and expanded to be taller than Jack before snapping into place over the jeep like a magical decal, molding over every square inch.

  Once the light faded, Jack turned back to us. “Done.”

  “That was it?” Lexie seemed confused. “If that was all it took, then why haven't you taken us on a field trip before?”

  “For one, I was finishing the more extensive work I started earlier this morning,” he explained, irate at Lexie's question. “And for two, every time you leave this place is a massive risk that I will not take with our lives unless I have to. No spell is perfect and every spell can be broken. If you wander too far from this—” He pointed to the jeep, then make a circular hand gesture to indicate all of us. “— then they will find us and we are all dead.”

  “But not a single time?” she pressed.

  “No.” He enunciated, stepping to within inches from Lexie.

  Sighing, I walked past them and climbed into the back of the jeep. “Come on, you two, before you kill each other.”

  “We can't, remember?” Lexie reminded me, still stuck in the Mexican standoff with Jack. “You're bonded to both of us. As long as we don't kill you, we can strangle each other to our hearts' content.”

  “You make it sound so… satisfying, sfaciatella.”

  Immediately, Lexie backed up from him with a shocked, accusatory look on her face. “You just had to make it dirty, you pig!” She stomped to the jeep and sat next to me in the back row of seats that didn't seem like they were really meant for passengers, seeing as how there weren't any seatbelts. But considering how old the jeep was, it could have pre-dated mandatory seatbelt laws.

  What was the worst that could happen?

  Jack, with a smarmy grin on his face, waltzed back into the house and reemerged moments later with a green backpack that I assumed was full of weapons that he slung in the passenger seat since it was empty.

  With a wave of his hand, he opened the back gate in the chain link fence and backed us down the driveway and onto the road to who-knew-where.

  7

  Scraggly tree limbs and brush pressed claustrophobically against the edge of the road that Jack stopped on.

  This was our destination— a roadside in the middle of nowhere?

  After nine months, two weeks, and one day trapped in that rickety bungalow, this was the first place he thought to bring us. At least it was better than a dungeon.

  Scrub brush and trees crowded the road. There was not a single other person to be seen. There was, however, a dead opossum just up the road. It wouldn't be able to do much damage in a fight, but it was better than nothing.

  Surely that couldn't be what he brought me out here for, but then, I strongly suspected Jack had a few screws loose.

  “Why are we here?” Lexie asked, echoing my thoughts.

  Jack reached into his backpack and pulled out a large map that he opened up against the steering wheel. After checking it a few times with a quizzical expression and looking around a few times, he folded it and tucked it back inside.

  “We are not there, yet,” he answered. “You ladies should duck down and cover your heads.”

  “Wait, what?” I asked, my question turning into a scream as he floored the jeep, veering off into the brush at a break-neck pace.

  I dove down into the seat, knocking heads with Lexie on my way down. We ended up with our heads next to each other, almost touching the cracked leather covering on the seat bottom.

  We held on as tight as we could, but we still butted heads every time he flew over a bump… or a sapling.

  After a minute or two, the brush thinned out enough for us to venture a peek at where we were going. The trees obscured most of the view, but it seemed we were heading deeper into the woods. Where on earth were we going? He was starting to make me nervous.“Oh!” Jack said, surprised at something and slammed on the breaks, making me knock heads with Lexie again.

  “What the hell, Jack?” she cried. “This isn't a bumper car, you know!”

  “I almost missed our destination.” He shrugged.

  Like lightning, Lexie struck, grabbing Jack's head and slamming it into the metal side bar that would have supported a canvas roof.

  He stumbled out of the car with a hand to the side of his head. As though dislodging the bats from his belfry, he shook his head before giving Lexie a dangerous look.

  “Now you know how it felt to be in the back,” her angry voice chided.

  Just as Jack started to raise his hand in her direction, I stood up on the seats between them. “Cut it out, both of you.”

  “He started it,” she said at the same time he accused her.

  “Where are we?” I asked, finally taking a good look around at the small opening in the forest we had stopped in. Some distance away, a lighthouse was barely visible above the treetops.

  Lexie climbed from the backseat and onto sweet solid ground. “Headstones,” she pointed out.

  I followed suit and sure enough, there were small grave markers and tombstones scattered throughout the neglected clearing. Kneeling to brush some dead vines away from the nearest, it was clear that this was a very old cemetery. The etched names of each person buried here had been smoothed away from the stone over many years. An 18- was barely distinguishable under my fingertips.

  “So you took us to an empty graveyard? I wanted to see other people.” Lexie crossed her arms and glared at Jack, who stood leaning against the hood of the jeep.

  “You are amongst your own kind.” He gestured to the entire cemetery, which was no more than thirty graves.

  Thirty one, I corrected myself.

  There were thirty one bodies here. One grave on the far side of the field had two bodies in it, one adult and one small child. A mother and her toddler, I presumed. God, life was so much harder back then.

  Lexie started in his direction, murder on her face.

  I snagged her by the belt. “We need him alive.”

  “How alive does he really need to be as— useless!— as he has been for the better part of a whole year?” She had stopped when I held her back, but was still giving him an evil eye. “As far as I can see, a corpse would be just as useful.”

  Jack opened his mouth to say something. Before any more snarky remarks could come spewing forth, I gathered a ball of murky water from a nearby puddle and flung it into his face.

  He sputtered and spat the water out.

  Lexie's satisfaction radiated from her.

  “Break it up!” I shouted at both of them. “Or have you forgotten everything that's happened in the last week, the last year?”

  That shut them up.

  “So I'm supposed to try to raise one of these guys, right?” I said, pointing to the tombstone nearest me. “Why else would you have brought us here?”

  “That is correct, topolina.” Jack reached into the backpack in the front seat for my dagger and passed it to me. “Since you were so successful with a fresh body, I thought today we would try something a bit older.”

  “A bit?” I almost laughed at his hyperbole. Edgar was only a few days old, at the most. This grave was at least a hundred years older, probably more.

  He shrugged and gave me a confused look. “Just like it was yesterday.”

  “Remember, Constance, he's older than the mountains.” Lexie scoffed.

  “I am six hundred thirty,” he smiled, like that was an achievement. Though thinking about it, with all the violence and wars in this new, inhuman world, living that long was something to brag about. “If you are asking.”

  That thought upended my current concept of age. In the human world, aging was seen in a negative light and youth was coveted. For Paxians, it seemed to be the opposite.

  Lexie snickered. “Dude, you were born when the plague was still a hot thing.”

  Jack scowled. “Do not mock the Black Death. It took whole
families— men, women and newly born babies alike fell to the plague. I may not be human, but it was still heartbreaking to watch entire villages of people die.”

  She went silent.

  “We mages are immune to almost all human ailments, but we are not soulless to the plights of humans,” he continued, genuine now. It was rare that his voice didn't carry even a hint of mirth or sarcasm. “We do, after all, have some human blood in our distant ancestry.”

  I didn't know what to say to that and neither, apparently, did Lexie.

  Jack clapped his hands together, his mien of cheer back over his face. “Now, it is time to get to work. We have zombies to raise.”

  “Pick a grave, any grave,” Lexie announced sarcastically like some sort of twisted game show host, spreading her arms to the whole cemetery.

  I took a deep, centering breath and felt my necromantic magic drip from my body, seeping into the earth to find all thirty one teeny, tiny flames.

  Each one was so small, even smaller than Edgar's and… Mom's. They felt more like fragile embers of a bonfire long extinguished than a steady lit lighter.

  I shook myself and walked into the graveyard. Stepping between the graves, I wove my way deeper into the cemetery to find the tiniest, faintest ember in a grave on the far corner near where a rusted panel of wrought iron fencing hung askew from the branches of a bush. If I was going to challenge myself, I might as well go all the way.

  I knelt in front of the tombstone and caressed away the debris that covered the rough-worn stone. The only visible letters were the first name: AGN–S, Agnes. Her birthday and last day were completely illegible, but I was willing to bet that hers was the oldest body buried here by a lot.

  Stabbing my palm, I pressed my bloody hand against the ground and closed my eyes to see the vast black ocean stretched to the horizon of my mind's eye. I reached down into the earth with my magic, reaching for that tiny ember. I was worried for a moment that merely reaching for it would extinguish it forever, as though trying to take it would smother it.

  But I clasped it in my hands, watching it pulse in response to the touch of my necromancy. I smiled as I realized that it was throbbing to the beats of my heart.