“Francis.”
“Shut up!” Cassie yelled.
“Blane.”
“Stop this!”
“Devries.”
It hit her like a bolt of lightning.
“It was Ross’s father who helped save you from the darkness, Cassie. It was he who pulled you back from the abyss. You and Mr. Ross are joined together, riding on the same river of destiny. You should be with him, helping him. Not turning your back on him like this.”
The words seemed to be making her skull burn.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Cass bellowed.
She began to run. But only got a dozen yards before her boot tip caught on an exposed root. She fell heavily, facedown. And lay there as the bright blue glow moved up behind her.
The voice reached her ears once again, paining them.
“If you don’t turn back, Cassandra, everything might well be lost. You see, you are a part of the prophecy too.”
What the hell was she talking about? She rolled over angrily. Then froze, consumed with utter shock.
The Girl’s face seemed to have split up into dozens, each of them translucent and overlapping. Most of them were children’s too. But there was one set of features that stood out amongst the rest. That of a very aged woman, wizened, craggy, gaunt. Her hair was gray, and her nose was hooked. She wore bone earrings and a strange double scar was visible on her withered neck.
Her lips moved, in time with the Little Girl’s.
“A prophecy is not law, you see. No future is set in stone. It can be altered by free will. So, Cassie, you must decide. Can I trust you to choose wisely?”
Cass stared up numbly, lost for words.
And then, when she blinked…the Little Girl was gone. The glow had vanished. And the dimness of the graveyard settled around her again.
Her head went from side to side confusedly. She was well past the mausoleums by this time, and seemed to recognize this place.
Cassie started getting up, before coming to another rigid halt. There were two headstones in the thick grass in front of her, planted side by side. They were small ones, very plain.
Her parents’ graves.
For a while, it was like she was seventeen again, and staring at them for the very first time. Shock and guilt ran through her. Her mind had been a maddened blur, until this point. But it began to clear. And when that happened, she started to remember everything she’d done.
Hitting Lauren Brennan. Attacking the cops.
And Saul Hobart facing her, his lips moving. She couldn’t really hear what he was saying. But she knew that she’d been angry with him. Terribly so.
There’d been a sudden flash, and…
Oh my God! What had she done?
The wings on her back shrank away to nothing. Her feet and arms returned to normal, the weapons dropping away with dull thuds. Her usual skin tone and dark irises returned.
Cassie put a hand across her mouth, stifling the noises that were trying to push their way out.
And, sitting there on the damp grass, she rocked back and forth for the longest while, overcome by what had happened to her. What she’d brought down on the people that she cared about.
What she had let herself become…
CHAPTER 46
“We’ll make it happen here,” said Martha, once that I had outlined what I wanted her to do to me.
I looked around her place again, and didn’t like the sound of that. And so I told her so. Once set in motion, this could turn extremely violent. And I hated the idea of her peaceful, pleasant home getting damaged.
“So one more house gets wrecked,” was her brisk, unconcerned reply. “That’s happened enough already, and most people don’t even have the powers and resources I do. No, Ross, it’s worth the risk. We’ve no more time left for delays.”
Lauren had been looking at me strangely for a while. Silently, with her brow creased. I supposed that, up until this point, she’d been seeing me merely as some kind of ordinary detective, simply trapped in extraordinary circumstances And trying to make the best of it. But now she was beginning to understand that I got involved, myself, in the arcane on some occasions. Sometimes right up to my neck. If she thought that I was happy about it, she was very badly wrong. But if you want to deal with certain situations in the Landing, you are sometimes left with no alternative.
I wondered briefly if I’d raised her opinion of me, or lowered it. But Martha was exactly right. There was little time left for considerations of that kind.
So I stared back at the lovely female adept. “I’d still hate to see this room smashed up.”
“Actually, I was thinking of my studio out back.”
I hadn’t known about anything like that. And wasn’t sure which kind it was until she led us there, opened the door, and flicked on the lights.
Me and Lauren followed her in, stepping into a white-walled area some thirty feet by forty. The floor was of very pale wood, and rang under our tread. Except it almost felt like floating, so light and airy was the space she had created.
There were no shades on the lightbulbs in here. Practically no ornamentation of any kind. Just paleness, like a blank sheet of paper, waiting to be written on.
But not completely that. At several points around the room, easels were set up. And there were bright spots of dried paint in a variety of colors spattered on the floor around them. The frames themselves were empty. And so…where was all her work?
Directly across from us was a massive picture window, spanning most of the length of the opposing wall. Set up in front of it was the only other large object in the room. A brass telescope on a wide tripod. It was pointed not at the sky, but at the town below.
What exactly did she paint? I began to wonder. Whatever it might be, it could only ever be viewed from a distance.
It occurred to me how lonely the life of an adept could become. She was a beautiful woman, brimful of vitality. But this home, when I really thought about it—pleasant to visit though it might be—was the tidy, comfy residence of a solitary spinster. Nothing more than that.
I liked her a lot, but felt very slightly sorry for her. Like many of her kind—when you looked at them closely—she seemed slightly distant from the world, regular life lost to her.
“Can I see what you paint?” I asked her quietly.
“Don’t we have other, more important things to do?”
But I persisted. At which, her cheeks became a little flushed. She walked across to the bare wall on our right. And when she pressed her hand against it, the top half of her arm went through.
There was some kind of secret area back there, the surface simply an illusion. And I’m pretty used to things like that, but noticed Lauren’s shoulders bunch.
When the hand came back, it was holding a small canvas by its wooden frame. Martha kept it turned away from me at first, but then pulled out another couple. I watched her take a deep breath. She wasn’t too comfortable doing this, it seemed. But then she walked across, and showed the paintings to me.
They were portraits. And I guessed, not of anyone she knew. She’d obviously got them from the telescope. But they still took my breath away.
The first was of an old man sitting on a bench by the lake in Crealley Street Park. You could see the personality etched into each line of his tired and largely shapeless face. The decades lived, for good or bad. The strengths and weaknesses that made up what he had become. It was all there, in colorful oils that seemed to transform themselves into a whole lot more than that.
“It’s wonderful,” I told her.
But her only response was to look away.
The other two were of a teenage girl, about thirteen, and a young mother with a baby. One was launching herself into her future, delighted but slightly scared at the same time. The other had set aside ambition, and was thinking only of her newborn child.
Martha remained distinctly edgy, although she managed to look back at me again.
“A
pologies. I’ve yet to finish one I’m genuinely pleased with.”
Which was what made her such a damned good artist. But telling her that would have only embarrassed her more. So I handed them carefully back, and watched as she hid them away again.
It was time to get on with what we’d come here for.
The lights were on dimmer switches, and she turned them to their lowest point before she started. The night seemed to press through the window and close in around us. After a few murmured words, the segments of the Thieftaker began to rotate, their shifting facets throwing out sparks of brilliance against the walls. The device started making a faint cranking sound, like a chainsaw in the distance.
“Time to work your magic,” I told Martha.
“But to take on that particular form…?”
“A theory,” I told her.
It was more an instinct, really. But I knew she trusted mine.
“You think she’ll be glad to see him?”
“Precisely the opposite, is my guess.”
Creases appeared in her temples. She had no idea what I was talking about. But she had the sense to give me the benefit of the doubt.
“We’ll be waiting in the next room,” she told me. “I can cast a Spell of Shielding, so we shouldn’t be detected.”
“One more thing,” she added. “If it does get violent, you’re on your own on that score, I’m afraid. I’m no use in the slightest when it comes to that.”
I doubted that was entirely true. This was someone who could manage pretty much anything she wanted, if she really needed to. But just past her shoulder, Lauren was checking her Walther. So we had that angle covered, and I didn’t need any more help in that regard.
“You’re doing enough already,” I assured her.
“I hope so,” she answered slightly ruefully. “There’s no point in my staying here. I’ll work my magic on you from the living room.”
She went out, Lauren following her. The door banged shut behind them.
Alone in the dim, echoing space, I could feel my heart racing a little quicker and the lines on my palms getting damp. Oh boy, here we went again. As I’ve pointed out, I had been used as a conduit for magic before, and the experience had left me shaken. Disconnected, torn apart from who I really was. My body kept on trying to clench up at the memory of it.
Except that, by this time, I was already altering.
I could feel my fingers stretching, my whole body narrowing and then stooping over. My hair was growing longer, tickling at my neck. Even my clothes were changing, getting darker. Finally, the vision faded in my left eye until the only thing that I could see there was a milky fuzz.
I should have been expecting that last transformation, but it startled me worse than anything else. I turned around and walked to the big window. It was highly polished, very clear against the darkness of the night. And slightly reflective. Peering through my good eye, I could see my image in it.
I was shorter than I had been, with my back severely hunched. And a good deal thinner too. I had a black suit on, which hung around my frame like a wet rag. My hair had turned pure white, sprouting in every which direction. And the same was true of my eyebrows.
My good iris was a weird, gleaming turquoise. This was simply a disguise, but a pretty convincing one.
The Thieftaker continued to grind away, casting out swift, glinting scraps of light. It was the only movement in the room, apart from my own breathing. Dozens of little pale specks continued to sweep across the shadowy walls like a planetarium gone rather wrong.
But nothing else was happening.
“Gonna keep me here all evening?” I murmured impatiently, under my breath.
Then I took in what the problem was. I’d never once seen any of those balls of vapor move through an obstruction. So I went along the picture window, found a catch at the far end, and slid a section back.
The night air—beyond the opening—seemed extremely heavy, laden with ugly possibilities. The town’s streetlamps and a few windows glittered far below. It looked wide open and very vulnerable to my protective gaze. And battles were still taking place.
Could I see something else moving out there, very faintly? Something closer up? I wasn’t sure. My hand clenched a little.
When the ball of pale vapor came surging into the room, there was no real warning. I didn’t even see the thing approach the glass. It seemed to come rushing inward out of nowhere.
I stepped back to the center of the room. It hovered a couple of yards in front of me, like it was giving me a good hard look. Its edges boiled briefly. Was it surprised?
It was seamless at the moment, a featureless cloud of pallid gray. There was no way to tell where Hanlon started and Millicent left off. In all the time that I’d been fighting magic forces, I had never before faced anything like this.
The thing to do, I guessed, was to try and take it off balance, before the people in it figured out what was really going on. I tried to straighten my bent back, then decided it was better not to.
“Milly! What do you think you’re playing at, young lady?”
I had to hand it to Martha. She had worked this spell just as thoroughly as before. It wasn’t only my appearance that had been altered. My voice was wheezy, croaky, exactly like Lucas’s had been.
I stooped a few inches lower and patted one bony kneecap.
“Come to Poppy,” I said softly, with a quiet, cruel undertone.
If I was right, then I felt pretty awful, goading her this way. But too much was at stake by this stage of the game. Far too many lives were hanging in the balance. And survival can be a ruthless thing, any way you care to cut it.
The ball of vapor drifted closer. Then it narrowed down its middle. It was starting to divide into two separate parts.
This seemed to be working. So I kept it up.
I dropped my voice to the gentlest croon that I could manage. And made sure that it retained a faintly mocking undertone as well. If I wanted to get under her skin, this seemed the right way to do it.
“Be a good girl, Milly. Do as Poppy says, like you did when you were little.”
The vapor separated almost completely into two sections of equal size. Only a thin strand, darker than the rest, was joining them together. It didn’t shift or waver, the way the mist on either side did. And so…was that the wand? It occurred to me that each might be clutching one end of it.
I’d have to make her let go, in that case. And still felt pretty bad doing it this way. But I could see no choice.
“Did you think that death would stop me, Milly? Did you think that you were free of me at last? Well I’m back, and ready to start again where I left off. I’ve still got so much to teach you. Thousands of new wonders and horrors that you ought to know.”
Which was what—I had already guessed—had made Millicent turn out the way she was. Being introduced to Lucas’s world at far too early an age. If she’d been thinking sensibly, she would have seen through this. But I was plucking at far deeper and more primitive nerves than that. Wounds like the ones I believed she’d suffered never properly healed up. And when they were reopened, surely rational thought dissolved? That was precisely what I was counting on.
The ball of vapor to the right resolved itself into a vaguely female form. It remained monochrome for a few heartbeats. Then its details and full range of colors suddenly became apparent.
Millicent’s features were drawn so tight, they barely seemed to fit across her skull. Her mouth was pulled back like an elongated knife mark. And her turquoise eyes were blazing.
“This can’t be!” she bellowed. “How can you be here again? I saw your corpse! This simply can’t happen!”
All I did was favor her with a smug, sickly grin.
“Anything can happen, if you want it enough, Milly dear. And I want to be with you again so badly.”
Which finally broke her. She let out a strangled yell. Barely human. Utterly confounded.
Then she let go of the wand, and th
rew herself at me.
CHAPTER 47
She came at me with such tremendous fury that—I have to admit—I wasn’t properly ready for it. Ought to have been, God knew. I’d faced enough that was destructive and malevolent the past couple of days. But I was only thinking of her size compared to mine, and had underestimated the extent of her bottled-up, bottomless fury. It struck me with the force of a tidal wave, exploding over me.
I raised my arms to fend her off. Easily outweighed her, and my reach was longer. But she just ploughed through, clawing at me, her fingernails as sharp as scalpels. And they tried to rip my neck first, before heading for my face.
I tried grabbing at her wrists, and only partially succeeded. Her hands kept slithering out of my grasp and attempting to savage my cheeks again.
When I finally got hold of them both, she let out another howl. Then started kicking at my shins with her high-heeled pumps. It hurt like hell, but I hung on.
Millicent came to a halt next instant. Went completely still, like stone. Her eyes grew even wider, and I thought I’d managed to subdue her. Then I saw the truth.
I’d made a big mistake here, hadn’t I? Her grandfather had been a very old man, strong in sorcery, but physically feeble. In which case…?
Her head cocked at an angle. And a gleam of recognition sparked up in her blue-green eyes. Her inner senses had most probably taken over, I imagined.
“You?” she blurted abruptly.
She had seen through the illusion.
Her whole mood changed in less than a second. The heat in her dissipated. It was suddenly like holding on to a big block of ice. Her entire body became stiff. And her strange, feline gaze felt like it was trying to drain the warmth out of mine.
Understanding she’d been tricked, she looked at the remaining ball of vapor. But if she was counting on Hanlon’s help, she’d got that completely wrong. He was now the sole owner of the wand. And was already retreating through the window. Even I was startled at the speed with which he’d turned his back—if you could call it that—on her.
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