The headlines repeated in my mind. Fifty-four dead. The ache in my chest began anew, and I realized what the mysterious feeling tugging at me had been. All my energy left me and I sat in the shower, hugging my knees to my chest. Guilt.
It washed over me like the water from the showerhead. It was heavier, though, and caused me to struggle for air while tears rolled down my face. The barriers of protections that the shock had created were crumbling around me as the gravity of the situation wore in.
If I am all-powerful, why didn’t I do something? I scolded myself. Then another thought interrupted. If that was an indication of the magicians’ power, how am I ever going to survive?
Fear mingled with my remorse about being so helpless and running away. I sat in the shower and sobbed, unaware of the time.
There’s nothing you could have done. You’re not trained, you’re alone. The logical portion of my mind spoke to me, but it was too quiet to quell the onslaught of revelations. It was the first time I had approached my supposed enemy — and I had run away, terrified.
The first time was the earthquake near your home, and you stopped that with your magic, the logical half said. Again, I chose to ignore it.
The cold water kept striking my skin, but I could no longer feel it. Steam started to rise in the bathroom. I felt hot. My natural instincts kicked in and the terror was replaced by fury. Fury at the magicians for ruining lives, fury at my inability to help, fury for my situation. I told myself this was different than self-pity.
Suddenly, I was too hot. I reached out to turn off the hot water completely, but the knob sizzled when I touched it. Carefully, I stood. As I touched the shower curtain to pull it aside, it ignited in my hand. In an instant, I was boxed into the ceramic tile by a wall of fire.
A scream tore from my lips before I could think. The bathroom door banged open and Kian darted for the showerhead, pushing the fire aside with towels and spraying the flaming curtain. It was over as soon as it had begun.
We were left in a room filled with thick grey smoke, both gagging and coughing on it. Amazingly, though not reassuringly, the fire alarm in the hotel room hadn’t even gone off.
That’s when I realized I was completely exposed. Kian noticed at the same time and quickly turned away. For an instant, I even thought I saw some red creeping up his neck and into his ears. He turned towards the door and held out a hand to me. I took it, frowning, and practically skipped into the room to dive under the sheets.
“You keep doing that, you’re going to let the magic consume you unless you are more careful!”
It was the first annoyance I’d seen from him. He sounded angry in the way your parents get angry. Concerned.
“You need to learn to control yourself. Aren’t you frightened?” he asked.
My sob-fest in the shower was still fresh on my mind. I wanted to stall talking about it, afraid I would break out in tears again.
“Okay.” I stared at him defiantly. “I’m terrified. I have no idea what’s happening to me. If it’s not crippling visions, then I’m catching on fire or something.…” I waved my arm around the room while speaking and found the scratched ceiling. I sighed. My hands still held the cuts from last night’s expedition up the hotel room wall. “And,” I continued, “you can’t teach me.”
“But I can help you,” Kian said. “Powers like yours went elsewhere in the family.” He smiled at me in the same crooked way I saw earlier, though I didn’t get his joke. “Besides,” he added, “you are not going to escape the magicians or even survive your memories if you let your emotions set you on fire.”
His features implied he was joking, but a hard lump suddenly appeared in my throat. He was right. I didn’t stand a chance.
Later that evening, when I had dressed, eaten, and calmed somewhat, we watched the news until the day’s events began to be a monotone. When night was beginning to set in, my heartbeat quickened. Tonight I would try Kian’s method. As the darkness swept over the city, Kian closed the curtains and turned towards me, looking determined.
“Your magic is natural,” he told me. “You have never had to struggle for it, steal it, or lie for it. It is your birthright. As far as I know, your powers lie within your soul. They are yours to command. No magicians’ rules. No laws. The only thing I can tell you is that if you try to expend too much, or if you don’t consider your human body, your magic can kill you.”
Great.
“Once,” Kian continued, “you and a handful of others were strong enough to defeat the magicians, even as the Romans were calling your attention away — you were stretched too thin. You were fighting two wars. You controlled your power, and only you can rediscover how. I had hoped that your memories would unlock your abilities, but I suppose you must unlock your memories first.”
I opened my mouth to protest. Each so-called memory that had returned to me featured a man I did not know, overwhelming and confusing feelings, and more often than not, pain. And what about my dream from the night before? What was that?
Kian saw I was lost in thought and cut in. “You must find a way to initiate your memories and find your power. Perhaps if you can control them, they won’t cause you such pain.”
I thought over his words as I chewed my bottom lip. I had changed in the past few days — had it only been few days? Before then, I had experienced nothing. Now I felt like I had experienced everything. Kian, sitting on his bed a mere two feet away from me, had changed too. He was still handsome, still eerie and magical, but he was more human now. Did he just appear that way to me? Had he shown me his human side?
I kicked myself when I realized my thoughts were lingering on Kian rather than how to unlock my memories.
“My father used to tell me,” Kian said, one eye on the television, “that if you think long enough about any problem, the answer will come to you.”
I sighed. “So your wise suggestion is to … think?”
Kian nodded. “That, or be torn apart by your own soul.”
One week after arriving in New York, I was starting to long for home. Kian and I explored the city by day, and during the evening I lay prone, trying to regain some memories of my past life. I missed my parents and being constantly surrounded by animals.
After the incident at the pier, I was amazed at how life went on as usual. The president declared a state of emergency due to flooding in New York and a few other states, and a week of mourning for all the people who died when the sea surged. There had been an earthquake off the coast, just like the news said. No one mentioned any magicians trying to destroy the world.
“They are using the earth, just like last time,” Kian had said, pounding a fist into his other hand. I watched him pace our small room. “They are setting the pieces into motion, but it’s impossible to know how much time we have.”
So I had some time to learn, at least. I was getting fed up with my efforts. Lying on my back in the hotel room, I tried to blanket my mind in the knowledge that my soul held a strong power, and that another life was residing inside me.
Sometimes I succeeded in transporting my consciousness to the place where I could see through the eyes of my previous self. The visions were blurry, and the world spun. I threw up over the side of the bed on one occasion. Still, Kian assured me we were making progress.
Other times, I fell asleep. Kian would prod me awake with his foot if I began to snore. For someone who was bent on collecting every one of my kind to save the world and ourselves, he seemed very content staying with me in the hotel room. He even began to ignore his phone when his mysterious magician contacts would begin to call.
I had tried to look inside myself like I had done in my dream and find the power there, but more often than not, all I saw when I closed my eyes was grey. Boredom seized my mind and I found myself dreading the evenings when Kian forced me to try to find my memories. To my frustration, he would not let me give up. He read magazines and books quietly while I lay. I found my mind drifting to him when I would run out of things to t
hink about. I always pushed him to the back of my mind. I realized it was because I didn’t want to hope. Hope for what, I didn’t know. But my thoughts would linger on when he took my hand.
On our eighth evening in New York, I closed my eyes. I figured on the occasions I had worked magic, I was scared. But what did it feel like?
I tried to bring myself back to the events when I knew I had used my magic: the earthquake in San Francisco, the fall in Oregon, in the shower. Each time I had been under emotional duress, pulled beyond my limit. I put myself in all of those terrifying scenarios again. What did I do? How did I do it?
Minutes passed before the silence in the room weighed on my mind.
“Can you turn on a radio or something?” I asked Kian. He fiddled with the radio near the television until rock music played clearly. He raised an eyebrow at me.
“Too quiet,” I said.
“Must be horrible to concentrate with,” he muttered, but I chose to ignore him. He turned the volume up, sprawled back out on his bed and resumed reading his book, a historical account of World War I.
I closed my eyes again and focused. Soon the music was seeping into my mind, driving me crazy, yet I could not get up to turn it off. I realized I was driving it into my thoughts — it was a welcome distraction from what I was doing. The noise forced its way in like it was trying to corral whatever was hiding to come out. Thinking about the music and my magic at the same time was stirring something in my heart.
A new song came on. A piano played a few bars of a frantic intro before the other instruments joined in. I focused on that, but the power in me kept building. Stunned, I realized being distracted helped.
My magic was locked off to me if I searched for it. As is the way of the universe, I found it right when I stopped looking.
By the time the song moved into the chorus, my chest was seizing. It became hard to breathe. I fought the urge to cough and sputter. I knew where my magic was now. I could feel it buzzing in my blood, my muscles, and my bones. It was like a spark that ignited throughout my body. I developed a new perspective that allowed me to see it and separate it from my human self.
I took myself back to the time Kian had chased me. I had pushed the ocean away from me when I fell, creating ice. When the earthquake struck near my home, I had shoved its power away, at least subconsciously. Now, I experimented.
I mentally pushed and squeezed at the magic, moulding it, forming it to my body. The concentration of it in my chest would kill me, I was sure. I could feel sweat running down my face, but I continued. Eyes tightly closed, I mentally eased the magic into me. Soon I wore what felt like a suit of magic. It pulsed in an unfamiliar way, out of sync with my heart.
Slowly, I opened my eyes. Kian was still on his bed, but he eyed me curiously. Stunned, I saw night had fallen. I sat up. My magic suit vibrated.
“What …” Kian began.
I tried to open my mouth to interrupt him, but my throat vibrated. My teeth chattered. It was all I could do to keep the magic with me.
“Gwen?” Kian asked.
I sat staring at him, wide-eyed. I was unable to speak for fear of letting go of the suit would either fade the magic or have it explode from my body. I held up one shaking finger, telling him to give me a minute.
I lay back down again and closed my eyes. This fragile state of mind would not do. Now I could see myself from the side. I could see the power that had taken me over.
I controlled it once, I said to myself, I can do it again.
The memory of the people on the pier came back to me. I had been helpless. I would not be again. Seeing myself from the side allowed me to imagine the magic like an aura, hanging around me, suffocating me. I began mentally kneading it back into my body. The resistance I found in my mind scared me.
Finally, I had pummelled it into the depths of my soul, where it belonged. Before opening my eyes again, I searched around for any hints that memories had been unlocked.
Nothing yet, I sighed to myself. Then I sat up.
Kian still watched me. His book was put away. The radio played more rock music. Gripping the edge of my bed, I stood. I extended my arms out towards the window and pushed at the magic again, this time through my fingertips. As if on cue, the window curtains blew open to reveal the rising sun as if a gust of wind had disturbed them. It was dawn.
“Wow,” I breathed.
Chapter Ten
“So you just stopped thinking about it?” Kian asked me skeptically.
I nodded.
We were walking through Central Park on a sunny afternoon, days after my experimenting with fitting into magic. Belief had finally started to seep into me, and I felt like the very knowledge of who I had been (whoever that was) was giving me strength.
After sleeping off my initial fatigue, I had been trying new things every chance I got. The buzzing in my bones hadn’t stopped — it was there every time I looked for it, like an electrical current. I got used to it eventually.
Kian tested me, but moving objects was not a skill I possessed. Any time I tried to do something it was as if a small wind hit my target object and disappeared. It seemed a stereotype of possessing magic that I had to make rocks fly around. Kian assured me there was more to it, and I would find out with more memories.
Regardless of my weak magic, I felt empowered for the first time in my life. I felt strong. And despite myself, I revelled in Kian’s approval. Though I did not always pass his tests — he began warning me after he threw a lamp and nearly hit my head — I was adjusting to the life of a magician. The security guards at the hotel, who knew us by name at this point, were called again every so often, but only eyed the wreckage suspiciously and left.
I was only disappointed that I could not increase my memories faster. Since fitting into the magic, I had bits and snippets of the past thrown at me. It was either pieced together or too abstract. A tiny mud house. Fog. Green everywhere. A grey sky. Always, a grey sky would loom above me.
I had two coherent visions. In one, I was riding a horse. The world was quiet. The sound of hooves and the smell of horse filled my senses. In the other, I was cold, wet, and annoyed. I waded through an extremely cold stream with people all around me, leading horses and holding weapons above our heads.
Both memories felt lonely to me. The emotions were simple, nothing stood out. I longed for another memory of him.
“Your powers obviously lie in the physical world,” Kian told me, eating one of the three hotdogs he had bought from a vendor. “Which makes sense, since your magic is of a past world. The old will have control over the new. Such is the way of the world.”
I didn’t get it, but sometimes I just let him talk to hear his voice.
“And yours?” I asked him.
He hadn’t used any magic, as far as I could tell, since we arrived in New York.
“Not natural,” he said simply. “I wasn’t born with any.”
He looked to see if I was following, and saw that I was not.
“Magic is simply manipulation,” he explained. “You were given the gift of manipulating your surroundings, and you never sought magic outside of your own talents, so that is all you know. Others,” I could have sworn I saw him shudder, “want to grow their magic, exploit it. Use it. They learn and perfect ways of moving beyond the realm of their natural abilities, becoming …”
“A magician?” I asked.
“A monster,” Kian answered. “Magic is addictive just like any other strength that feeds the body and the mind. It is hard to have enough.”
I didn’t probe his comments and instead focused on the day.
It had been a few weeks since I was supposed to go to school. Around me, teenagers who had just gotten out of classes wandered home in large gangs, usually smoking and cursing. It seemed so counter-intuitive to the positive hum of the park.
We walked back to the hotel, each lost in our own thoughts. We were almost back to the hotel when I stopped on the pavement.
“What is it?”
Kian asked.
I could feel the subway train rumbling below my feet. A small fear at the back of mind thought of the surging sea or the rolling bay in San Francisco. The underground thunder rumbled through my shoes and into my spine. What if the magicians tore through the earth with a power much greater than this train? All I had been doing was moving pebbles with small pulses of magic.
My thoughts shifted to escaping the magicians. At this point they were just black blobs in my mind, like abstract images — I had no idea what to actually expect. The vibrations of the train matched the buzzing of my magic until they became one.
Suddenly, my stomach dropped and I gasped and grabbed for Kian. I was submerged to my thighs in concrete, as solid as it had ever been. Below, I could feel my legs encased in concrete and my feet dangling painfully over the subway tunnel.
Kian’s eyes were so wide that it would have been comical were I not so panicked. He grabbed my arms and tried to shield me from the public, luckily sparse at this time of day. Everyone was either hurrying with heads low or walking determinedly.
It was something I had remarked on earlier about this city: people feared to look at each other or to notice each other. Well, it worked out for me since this was a hell of a situation to talk myself out of.
“What did you do?” Kian whispered at me frantically.
Hanging there hurt. My thighs were pinched and Kian’s tugging at my arms and torso didn’t help.
“I don’t know!” I had tried to whisper but my voice came out high and shrill. “I was just thinking about the train.”
Kian reached down and hugged me around the torso, then pulled hard. My body, aching after everything I had put it through in the last weeks, protested. His dark hair was in my face.
“Kian, that’s not going to work!” I nearly shrieked at him.
The light turned green nearby, a crowd of people who had been waiting at a stoplight were about to cross our path at any moment. He leaned down again to me.
Lives of Magic (Seven Wanderers Trilogy) Page 7