His voice is husky as if he’s just getting up, and I’m so happy to hear from him that it takes a few words for me to wonder if the huskiness isn’t from disuse, but from screaming.
“Max! Max, Jesus, I’m so glad you’re alright. You have to ge—”
His words are cut off as the power goes out. No more than a second passes from the lights spluttering out to my front picture window blowing in, glass flying everywhere right before the flames engulf the walls, the floor.
I soon realize what Striker’s words should have been.
They should have been get out.
Chapter Four
MAX
I never should have come back here. That is my very first thought as I stare at the flames licking their way closer to me. The bite of glass against my palm only serves to prove that thought true.
The words collateral damage flash like a neon sign in my brain, proving to me once again that maybe I’m not as good a person as I thought I was. Would a good person bring trouble to those around them? Would a good person stick around when they knew death was on their heels? Would a good person taunt their betters into firebombing their shop?
Probably not.
I sit here frozen, figuring I probably deserve the heat of the flames, deserve to burn. But it’s the whimper of fear behind me that snaps me out of my self-deprecating thoughts. Reminding me it isn’t just me in this room or this building.
In this fire.
I whip my head to the side and take in Della. She’s crouching behind the mirror-fronted receptionist desk, the glass cracked in some places, shattered in others. But Della isn’t the only person in this shop. I have two other artists here today plus their customers and mine, Jet. Bellows of fear meet my ears for the first time since the fire started, but they seem far off, distant somehow.
A buzzing whine overtakes the yelling, the tinny, warbling sound making me wince, my fingers reaching for my ears before I can stop them. My hands come away red, blood thick at my fingertips. It’s then I feel the slight tickle of a drip coming from my nose.
Was there a blast and I missed it? Or is this a spell? The world goes dark for a second, but I manage to shake my head enough to clear it a little.
The way out the front is completely blocked, the fire spreading up and out like fingers searching for light in the dark. I whisper a blessing of protection for Della and me and snatch up her hand, hauling her up with me as I search for a way out amongst the now smoke-filled shop. I used to think I’d know my way around this place blindfolded, but the acrid smoke filling my lungs tells a different tale.
Crouching low, I manage to slam my shoulder into a door jamb of the hallway before seeing the outline of the back door. “Do you see the door?” I ask her, my voice a guttural rasp, but she doesn’t answer me.
I shake her hand, squeezing probably too hard on her fingers. “Y-yes,” she responds, her voice a whisper when it probably really isn’t. Everything is a whisper. Everything is a muted form of gray when I know it is really vibrant oranges and reds.
This is a spell. I look down, sluggishly searching my hand for the ring that was supposed to bring protection. Naturally, it’s missing.
I look back into the now black void of my shop. “Go. Call for help.” I need to go back. I need that ring and the bone knife, and I need to save those people – the innocents who were so foolish to find themselves close to me.
“No. You need to come with me,” she insists, her hands becoming the firm ones, pulling, dragging me to the door. The air hits my face, fresh and clean and the pair of us huddle, gulping in the glorious oxygen.
“Here. You dropped this. Keep it close. The working in the smoke is meant to confuse, I think,” she says in between gasps, my grandmother’s ring in her palm as she offers it to me.
I nod my head for a second, plucking the warm metal from her hand until her words register, and I focus on her face. Della’s human – or she’s supposed to be. How in the hell does she know about workings?
Who the hell is she?
I don’t have the time or energy to figure out exactly what species Della is or what the fuck she’s doing in my shop. She’s helping me, and at the moment, that is really all I can ask for. Sliding the ring on my middle finger, my mind becomes clear again, like a fog lifting. Before Della can move, I have her throat in my hand.
“Who are you?” I ask, my hand gentle but insistent. I want an answer before I give her my back to get my people out.
“Not your enemy. Your grandmother sent me to look after you. I’m an ally.” Her voice is calm and soft but firm in a way I know her mouse routine was just that – a routine, a mask. Or maybe not. Eyes wide with fear, she unsuccessfully tries to hide her trembling. The faint scent of fear is in the air, and it’s coming from Della.
“Good,” I mutter dropping my hand, “I’m going back in there. You helping?” She shifts her feet, eyes sliding to the door and back to me. With a twist to her lips, she nods.
The door is warm to the touch as I throw it open. The heat and flames not yet reaching the hallway, but the sickly smoke wafting from the fire feels like fetid oil on my skin. Rancid, spoiled, sour. The air is ripe with it, the smoke like rotten fingers poking, prodding. Trying to get in my mouth, my nose, my lungs. The working is strong, meant to confuse, intended to reach into one’s mind and make them sit there while they burn to death. It feels like old, forgotten magics. Not Celtic, not Santeria, not anything I’ve ever seen, but familiar all the same.
I hold the breath in my lungs, praying Della’s doing the same. Without knowing the origins of the spell, I can’t stop it, but I might be able to hold it back enough to get my people out.
Blowing the last of my breath on my fingers, I mutter every Latin word I can think of for stop as I spin the working breath on the tips of them, the spell strengthening with every widdershins – or counterclockwise – revolution. Undoing, unraveling. Subsisto, tardo, confuto, concesso, subflamino, insisto, conquiesco, finis… Over and over, driving the fetid smoke back inch by inch, the green of my magic shines like a beacon in the dark.
All too slowly, the smoke recedes. Problem is, the fire itself isn’t magical, so smoke or not, my shop is still a big ball of flame. I can’t push the smoke back and douse the flames at the same time. The faint wail of sirens sound in the distance, but they feel too far away. We could all burn before I could even get anyone out of here.
Della moves around me, stepping close in the scant space between us and the spelled smoke weaving her way to the booths. Everything seems to move in slow motion. The smoke, Della, my nulling spell.
The smoke is too powerful. I feel it pushing back against me, searching for a break in my power, like a sentient thing. Intelligent in a way that means only one thing – the person who cast it didn’t just throw the spell and leave.
They’re still here. Pushing against me. Searching for a weakness, a break. Any fissure in my powers that they can weasel their way into.
I don’t have the luxury of time. Whoever casting this is stronger than me.
“Get them out,” I choke, “I can’t hold this much longer.” The sweat at my brow isn’t just from the heat of the flames. This working is kicking my ass in a way that I’ve felt before. This isn’t Witch work. This is a freaking Demon.
I’d bet on it.
Della comes from behind a hand-painted silk screen, a man thrown over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry. From the tattooed back of his head, I know it’s Jet, and Jet isn’t small. Confused customers and both my artists trail like a line of ducks behind her heading toward the back.
I don’t know if I should be confused or relieved. I’m sticking with relieved. Whatever super strength mojo Della has, it’s helping me out in a huge way. My only hope is Jet, and the rest of my people, are okay.
The sirens get louder, but the spell doesn’t abate. The caster doesn’t care that humans are in here, doesn’t care that they could have killed someone. They want something, and they really don’t ca
re who they hurt to get it.
I can think of only one thing in my possession someone would kill to have. Something people have probably killed several times over to have, throughout time, and space, and worlds.
A shiver works its way through me.
All of a sudden, I feel cold. The spell I’d been pushing against falters, and I almost sag at the reprieve. But it doesn’t last.
The sirens, once so close they were screaming, fizzle out as if someone turned the sound off on the world. The roar of the fire, the way it ate through my shop, the crackle and fizzle and pop of flames all silent.
My body trembles and I scramble back, half searching and half escaping to the office.
Whoever they are, I know what they want, and I’ll be damned if they get it. Not from me.
I spin the dial on the safe, my shaking hands missing the last number and I have to start all over again.
Shitshitshit.
The locking pins make a shuddering snap when they release, but before I open the safe door, I yank the silver chain from my neck. Wrapping it twice around my right wrist, I pull the blade from the protection of the safe and loop the last bit of chain around my hand and the knife, pricking my finger on the tip and smearing the blood along the hilt.
Whispering ancient words of a magic I barely understand, the silver liquefies, the links transforming into a rope of metal binding the knife to my hand. The hot metal burning my skin in a way that I know I’ll scar, maybe in every healed body that comes back.
I try to think of the vanity of it instead of the pain. Instead of the smell of burning flesh. Instead of how this binding might be permanent. Instead of the blood and death magics I just used to protect the very thing I hate.
I whirl, watching as the flames freeze in place – unmoving, unwavering. The smoke itself like gray fog clouds hanging in the air. My shuddering whispers the only sound, my lips the only movement.
Until I see the shape of a man, his form made up solely of black smoke, flickering and wavering as if he has no corporeal form. Only his eyes are solid, unflinching, glowing yellow piercing through the dim. They follow the length of my arm, tracing down my body until they latch onto the blade practically soldered to my hand.
The blackness rushes me, and I scramble back, scrabbling in a truncated crab walk until my back hits the plaster of a wall. And still he comes, a screeching scream of rage and wordless command vibrating through the ruins of my shop.
I slash with the blade the way Aidan taught me to, aiming for where the soft spots would be on a human. I know full well it won’t kill whoever it is who seeks it, but a knife is a knife, and any weapon is better than nothing.
Aidan taught me that too.
The screech of command morphs into one of pain or rage, the form backing away, retreating at my paltry slash.
And somehow someone turned the sound back on in the world. The sirens scream, men yell on the street. The roar of flames return.
I snap my fingers on my left hand, the action smarting a bit with a cut finger, but that’s the least of my problems.
Traveling from my burned-out wreck of a shop, I arrive at a door in the middle of a dim hallway. Numera omnes qui ingrediuntur ad iudicium.
Judgment comes to all who enter.
Before I destroy the carved mahogany of the high courtroom door, all I can think is, you’re goddamn right it does.
Chapter Five
MAX
The wood splinters exploding into the too perfect high courtroom make my lips tip up just slightly. The ghost of a smile flitting across my face and gone in an instant. Rage wars with the betrayal in my gut. How could they do this to me?
I know I told them I wouldn’t kill Andras, but burning out my shop? Putting all my people in danger just to steal a freaking weapon? If they wanted the bone knife, they should have just fucking asked for it.
Barrett’s surprise as he recovers from his cowering crouch in front of the dais warms my cold dead heart. Shards of wood pepper the floor, and his expensive loafers slip on them, making him unsteady on his feet. If I were to guess who on the Council ordered the firebombing of my shop, Barrett would be at the top of the list. Hell, Barrett would be the entirety of the list.
“I want to know why,” I croak, the soot and smoke still clogging my throat even though this air is fresh as a damn daisy. It pisses me off. I want to rub my soot-covered self all over the pristine whiteness. I want to smear it with my blood. I want to spill it, too. Maybe Barrett’s, but maybe not.
The dark side of myself, the one that I try to keep buried, wants to know if Barrett has friends or family. It wants to put them in danger instead so he knows how it feels. It wants the equal and opposite reaction, wants true vengeance. True reparations.
Fury like I’ve never felt courses through me. It should feel warm, right? It should be a fire under my skin, but it isn’t. It’s cold, icy. A frozen tundra of rage ready to exact my will.
“Why what? Fates, child, what in the name of perdition happened to you?” He looks almost… concerned? The fake worry on his face makes me want to slap him right across his snooty freaking mug. Maybe with my right hand – the one with a knife attached to it.
“For a man so keen on the rules, you sure know how to break them. I want to know why you firebombed my shop. Humans were in my shop. Humans, Barrett,” I snarl as I watch the ambient white of the room take on a green cast, my magics rising in me and out so much I tint the room in their glow. The heat of them feel like soothing flames, masking the agony of the blade in my hand, the smoke left over in my lungs.
“I didn’t—” He scrambles back a step, slipping on the wood again.
“Then you made someone or bribed someone. You want this blade so bad, you come and get it.”
As I speak, the path from me to him cracks and shakes, the floor vibrating with my powers as it continues to rise in me. I’ve always hated a bully.
The marble floor shifts, peaking at the crack, the movement tossing Barrett off his feet. He scuttles back, trying to get away from me, muttering something under his breath. Not Latin, not French, something I’ve heard before but can’t place.
Other than a zing of heat flashing over me, his spell does nothing. No blood, no broken bones, no flames, just a big load of fuck all.
My power rages again, shaking the foundations of whatever this place is. It feels neither here nor there, not on Earth, but not in Hell. Not Heaven. It feels like nowhere and everywhere, and me and my rage, my power is breaking it apart. The sick part of me smiles, happy at the destruction. It’s hard to hold back on this newfound bloodlust, this call for vengeance and death. The siren call of retribution.
“Stop, Maxima. I didn’t hurt your people. I didn’t.”
Then the distance between us is gone, the fingers of my left hand around his throat, pinning him to the cracked dais.
“You wanted me dead from the moment I walked in here. Told me as much. Why should I believe you now?”
“Because I believe in the law, and hurting humans is above all the worst thing I can do.”
The truth of his words takes a minute to filter through the bloodlust, through the call in my brain that tells me to rip into his flesh with the bone blade and watch as his innards paint this stupid white floor red.
Truth. His words smell of truth.
My magics flare again, and I wish I could say they were healing me, but they aren’t quite doing the job anymore. My stomach pitches suddenly, nausea and pain bleeding back into me bit by bit as my adrenaline wanes.
Barrett looks afraid, and I don’t know if that fear is guilt or something else. All I know is I feel tired.
Tired of it all. Tired of fighting and getting nowhere. Tired of people dying. Tired of never being accepted, never really having a family. My rage peters out, and all I’m left with is…
“You sneaky little shit,” I accuse, leveling Barrett with what is probably my best glare. “A tired spell mixed with what? A depression or self-loathing one? Fates,
you’re diabolical. I didn’t even see your lips move.”
A wry grin peeks out of the cloud of his face, and he straightens fully away from my hand that has fallen from his throat, and that’s when I notice Marcus sitting at his seat at the dais, his feet crossed at the ankles on top of the table, a bag of chips in his hands. He munches on one as he surveys us, the crunch of it practically echoing through the room.
“She could have killed us both, and you’re eating bloody crisps?” Barrett accuses, dusting off his suit jacket and straightening his tie. His cultured British fading away to a less polished version that he seems to hide.
“I told you she was going to kick your ass one day. Didn’t think it was going to come so soon. I didn’t want to miss it,” Marcus says around the food in his mouth.
“No help at all. Sitting there eating bloody crisps. She could have killed me.”
“And if you sent someone to hurt her humans you would have deserved it. I was doing my Council duty to act as witness to either your sanctioned death or her crime. You’re a twelve-hundred-year-old Witch against an untrained Rogue a third your age. I assumed you could handle it.”
“You’re a right tosser is what you are. Against a Witch and Demon hybrid that shouldn’t even exist! It’s like a house cat going after a Bengal tiger. One of them is an apex predator and the other is not.”
His words are like a blow, a sucker punch when I was already going down. Shouldn’t even exist. I feel my face go slack, the laugh at their exchange falling off my lips. Marcus catches my expression before I can wipe it clean.
“That isn’t what he meant, Maxima. Barrett wouldn’t be Barrett if he didn’t accidentally insult someone every five minutes. You’d think he would be a better conversationalist by now, but he kinda sucks at it.” Marcus’ tone is consoling, and if Barrett’s words didn’t echo what I already thought about myself, it probably wouldn’t sting so bad.
I give Marcus a tremulous smile, the spell Barrett cast still pinging every horrible thought I’ve ever had about myself through my brain, making his words fail to ring true.
Daughter of Souls & Silence Page 3