by Lila Dubois
And they’d done every curse-removal spell in every book, at least three times. Nothing had worked, and in the final two weeks before her birthday the curse began to manifest on her skin. It had started on her back, and she’d noticed they’d behaved oddly with her—tender, almost unwilling to be hard and rough. She’d had to ask them what it was that made them brush their fingers over her skin so hesitantly.
Harris had taken a Polaroid of her back and shown it to her.
That was the moment, standing there holding the picture, that the small amount of hope she’d let blossom withered and died.
She’d be at peace, if only she were sure that the spell they’d created would work. The spell, which she’d modified to incorporate Harris and Trajan’s power, also included some elements from spells they’d found in the papers Trajan’s coven had provided. If it worked, the casting would allow her to bind the curse as she died, holding it to her even after death so it couldn’t jump to her sister.
“Goddess damn this place and time because it isn’t fair,” Trajan snarled.
He threw his hands up in a gesture of rage and frustration. Then a whole bunch of things happened at once.
Robert, who’d been poking their small campfire with a stick, stumbled back, the stick still in his hand, the tip of it dancing with flame. The trees groaned as the wind buffeted them, and Harris crouched, pushing her down, his body over hers. Nim’s hands and knees struck the ground. The mighty roots of the redwoods rose, a few of them breaching the topsoil.
Harris looped his free arm through one exposed root. He yelled to Robert, “Hang on!”
Nim’s hair had fallen in her face, which meant that all she could see was the tiny flickering flame on the end of the stick Robert held.
He dropped it, and Nim reached for the flame, not even sure why she was doing it.
The cyclone that had been forming in the sky dropped onto them. She heard Harris grunt as something, maybe a camp chair, slammed into his back.
“Shit!” She just barely heard Robert’s exclamation. She caught sight of him between the lashing tails of her hair, and saw that he had reached out for the logs from the fire, which were now dancing in midair.
As she watched, the fire streaked from the logs to his hand, enveloping him in a nimbus of fire. His eyes were wide with horrified shock. The air around him started to sparkle, as if a thousand of those disco-ball dust motes were congregating around him. They threw off light despite the fact that the cyclone had picked up dirt, fallen debris, and their camping equipment and tossed it into the air, darkening the sky.
“Trajan, stop!” Nim shouted. The words were immediately carried away, but wind was his element, and she hoped he would be able to hear her.
A tortured sound of pain snapped her attention back to Robert. He was on fire. His entire body was outlined not just in flame, but in glowing embers. The smell of burning hair and sizzling fat hit her.
Nim threw out a hand, reacting instinctively. She and Robert were in the same cabal. Fire and earth magic didn’t react to one another, and some alchemy scholars had theories that those magics were related and that possibly, thousands of years ago, practitioners might have existed who had power over both elements.
That was all just a brief flash of thought in the back of her mind when all she could really think was what incredible pain he must have been in. Faster than it had ever responded before, the earth opened under Robert. His burning body dropped in. She had a last horrified glimpse of his face—his mouth open in a scream, flames dancing inside his mouth—and his eyes glowing with a white-hot light. The earth swallowed him, closing in on top of him, smothering the flames.
Robert was dead.
Thanks to her, dead and buried.
Harris, who was still holding her down, grunted with effort, and a second later the cyclone sputtered and died. Nim shoved her hair out of her face to see Trajan, who was prying at a wild rose vine that was wrapped around his chest. His mouth was open and he was gasping like a fish out of water.
“Hurry, I had to puncture his lungs.” Harris shoved to his feet.
Nim scrambled to her feet and raced to Trajan. Harris slashed his hand through the air, and the vine wrapped around Trajan’s chest withered and died. As it did, she saw the two massive thorns piercing her air witch’s chest.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Harris whispered. He grabbed Trajan’s arm, desperately matching up the marking on their arms. Nim did the same and then held out her other hand to Harris. He slapped his hand against hers, and when the marks met, light flared. The circuit was complete, and power raced through them, healing Trajan.
A gentle wind blew, a perfectly round sphere of quartz pushed up through the ground, and flowers grew and bloomed all around them.
Trajan sucked in a pained breath, coughed, and sat up. He rolled over onto his hands and knees and kept sucking in air. It was a few minutes before he spoke.
“I’m sorry,” Harris said again. “You were out of control.”
“I could have controlled it,” Trajan snapped.
Nim’s anger and sadness flared to life. She reached out and pushed Trajan hard. He fell onto his hip. “He’s dead.”
Trajan looked up, shocked. “What?”
“Robert. He tried to control the fire, to protect us, and he was…he was burning up. I had to bury him to put it out.” Tears spilled, and she hated that she cried when she was angry. “How could you?”
“Uh, he’s dead?” Harris asked.
“Yes.”
“Then we have a problem.”
Nim’s rage died when she realized they were both looking past her. She whirled around.
The spot where she’d been forced to bury Robert was moving. The soil bucked and heaved.
“That’s not me,” she whispered.
“New problem,” Trajan said. “Zombie Robert.”
A hand shot up through the soil.
Nim yelped and scrambled across the soil, throwing herself behind Trajan. He’d started it—the big dummy could get eaten first.
Trajan started to say something, reaching up to touch the arms she’d wrapped around his shoulders as she clung to his back. He jerked her arm away from him, holding it out.
“Look.”
Nim and Harris both looked at her extended right arm. The arm she’d reached for Robert with. The black marks that had all but covered her were gone, leaving only the few dark scar lines the blight vines had gifted her.
They looked back at the hand sticking out of the soil.
“We need the fire man,” Harris breathed.
“Nim, get him out!” Trajan ordered.
Nim slammed her palms against the forest floor, ignoring the burst of pain, and a wave spread out from her hands, moving under the surface as if the earth had been water and her power a dolphin racing just under the surface, raising a wave.
The bolt of power hit Robert, and the earth all but spit him out. It wasn’t the most elegant working she’d ever done, but it was fast. Robert flopped onto the forest floor, sucking in air and coughing, his whole body shaking, shivers and great racking coughs jerking his body.
They ran to him, dropping down beside him. Robert was naked, and there was not a single follicle of hair left on his body. But his skin was smooth and unblemished. No burns, no blackened dead patches.
“Robert?” she asked.
“Water,” he gasped. Harris jumped to his feet and started looking around the ruin of their camp for one of the large bottles of water.
Trajan turned him over and helped him sit up. Robert’s breathing was still labored as he leaned back against Trajan. Harris appeared with a water bottle, flipping the top open. Robert’s hand shook, so Trajan supported him as he raised it to his mouth.
“Robert?” Nim asked after he’d taken a few sips.
Robert’s eyes met hers, and the irises flickered with fire. Nim gasped and leaned back. Trajan and Harris leaned in, then they too sat back.
“What?” Robert asked. “I feel…”
“Can you see?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Your eyes…there’s fire in your eyes. And I don’t mean in the poetic sense.”
“Oh.” He looked around, frowning. His gaze landed on the perfectly spherical piece of quartz Nim’s use of magic had manifested. He stared at it, and a second later it popped, cracked, and started to sag.
“Holy shit!” he yelped. “It’s melting.”
“Stop melting it,” Nim said.
“I…I can’t melt rocks!” Robert looked around wildly, as if there was another fire witch hiding somewhere.
“Well, it’s not one of us,” Trajan said dryly.
“Robert, you have to control yourself,” Nim said. “Focus on the stone.”
She turned to watch the rock so she could track how Robert’s control was going. The rock had melted into a flattened dome with cracks running though it.
“Okay.” Robert’s voice wavered. “I’ll try.”
As she watched, the center of the stone started to glow, first pale pink, then red, then darkened to a beautiful maroon before lightening, approaching white-hot.
“Robert, I don’t think that’s it.” Nim speared her fingers into the ground, ready to call up a wall of soil in case the rock exploded into shards of lava.
“No…” Robert spoke in an odd voice. “I need to do this.”
The center of the stone pulsed with shades of white and gold, like the heart of a star. The once clear quartz on the outside turned the yellow of a canary diamond. Suddenly Robert threw out his right hand, and the stone, which was giving off wave after wave of heat, transformed into a cold, sandy-colored lump.
“Holy shit,” Harris breathed. “Did he just do earth magic?”
Nim crawled forward. “I don’t know.” She held her left hand out to the stone. It wasn’t hot, and she tentatively touched the surface of the now-gritty rock. It was granite. The same granite that made up the mountain, but it was tan flecked with bits of clear and yellow quartz. She pushed her senses into the stone, then jerked them back.
As she did so, her whole body recoiled. Harris and Trajan pulled her back. Nim looked down at her left hand, expecting to see it burned. Instead, what she saw was her own normal skin, devoid of all but the black scars.
“Firestone,” she whispered. “It’s like he trapped the heart of a star in that stone.”
“Whatever he did, it’s getting rid of the curse,” There was hope in Harris’s voice.
Nim closed her eyes, wanting it to be true, but the curse was still there; she could feel it, pulsing inside her.
“Just the physical manifestation,” she told him softly. Harris closed his eyes and she touched his cheek. “I’m sorry, my love.” She looked at Trajan. “I’m sorry, both of you. This physical manifestation is just a symptom of being here where magic is so much more abundant. Robert’s fire just got ride of the symptoms.”
She turned to Robert. “How do you feel?”
“Different. I feel…different.”
“I think somehow, when you called the fire, because you did it here, you might have developed some new powers.”
Robert blinked at her. “I did?”
Nim smiled. “I’m not really sure. I wish I had time to help you figure it out.”
That comment seemed to jerk him back to the present. He looked up at the sun, then pushed to his feet. He looked down at his own naked, hairless body, touched his bald head, then covered his crotch and shuffled over to one of their overturned tents. He tipped it up and slipped inside.
Nim looked around their destroyed camp. It felt bitterly right, that this place where she’d been so happy, learned so much, was gone.
“It’s time to get ready,” she told them.
Nim headed for the boulders. She looked back at them just before she turned the corner. Harris put his hand on Trajan’s shoulder and touched their foreheads together, whispering quietly.
She didn’t want to leave them. Nim pressed her lips together, holding back tears. She’d cried enough in the past two weeks. She’d cried on their shoulders, cried alone in the woods. She’d cried and cursed fate, cursed her aunts and cousins who had died and given her this pain. She’d mourned and raged.
And she loved. She’d tried to love Trajan and Harris as much as she could, enough to sustain her own heart and soul under the weight of approaching death. Enough so that after she was gone they would not think they had wasted even a moment’s time.
Chapter 23
For the first time, they crossed the river. Nim led them, barefoot and all but naked. She wore only two ceremonial scarves heavily embroidered with earth-magic themes in shades of brown and gold, which were draped over her shoulders. They were long enough that the ends fell to mid-shin in front and mid-calf in back, creating a sort of skirt that covered her front and back, but left the sides of her body totally naked except for where she’d wrapped the narrow ceremonial belt around her waist to hold everything in place. For nearly sixty years they had been used as part of the funeral services for the heirs of her coven. Robert had collected the ceremonial items from her family, saying he was part of the team trying to rescue her.
Trajan and Harris were similarly scantily clad—Harris in loose, thin black sweats and Trajan in bike shorts. Trajan had painted his chest with swirling patterns that reminded her of the wind, and Harris carried a knife made of still-living wood, a powerful magical weapon that by its very nature combined death—the knife’s edge—with life—the living wood. He carried a pack made of woven leaves over one shoulder.
She led them out onto the massive quartz that protruded over the river. The sun was low and the forest floor in shadow. The water below them looked black. On another day, she would have been afraid, but not today.
Nim raised her hand, straining to use her power across the running water, but the earth on the far bank answered her call. She wanted only to call up a thick ribbon of soil that would meet the quartz and create a physical bridge over the river. Over the course of these months she’d learned how use the small trickle of flora magic Harris had gifted her with during the transformation, enough that she would be able to call roots into the bridge to help stabilize the soil. Harris put his hand on her shoulder, ready to help her if needed. They talked and planned, replanned, and talked some more. They all knew what their roles were. Each knew what they had to do.
The first sign that this night would not go the way she’d planned was when the expected tongue of soil was instead a bridge of solid rock. It rose slowly and with perfect, elegant control, rising to touch the edge of the quartz.
“Um,” Nim whispered. “I must have used too much power.”
Neither of her men said anything. Nim stared at the granite bridge she’d created. This was it. Once she stepped onto that, it was the first step of her funeral march. The shadows lengthened.
Nim stepped onto the stone, her bare toes curling against the rough, cold surface.
When she stepped down onto the far bank, the punch of magic was enough to make her catch her breath.
“Whoa,” Harris said as he joined her.
“Fuck,” Trajan whispered reverently. “There’s even more ambient magic over here.”
“That’s good,” Nim said resolutely, even though fear made her scalp prickle. “More magic for the spell.”
She reached blindly for their hands. They twined their fingers with hers, and the fear receded. She looked up, and up, and up at the albino redwood. It towered over them, far taller than any tree that lacked its own chlorophyll—the mechanism for turning sunlight to energy—and therefore could not produce its own food had the right to be. There was a ten-foot by ten-foot area under the lower branches, near the trunk, that was perfect for their working, almost as if the tree or forest had created it for them.
With the sunset imminent, they stepped into the center of the casting area and began.
Nim focused on the steps of the spell. They’d practiced several times, and moved together with
beautiful efficiency. She created a circular trench three feet deep but only six inches wide around them, while Trajan called the quarters, using his voice to cast his words up into the sky. Once the trench was dug, Harris slowly called a living wall of small plants into life, weaving the stalks of the various shrubs, vines, flowers, and grasses as they grew. Using his living knife, he cut branches from the albino redwood and wove them into the green wall, grafting them to the living plants with magic.
When the casting circle was done, they started working on the runes and symbols—Trajan drawing them in the air; Harris cutting them into the earth with his living knife; and Nim selecting small rocks from within the now-secured circle, using her power to carve sacred symbols, and setting the carved rocks at the five points of the star. She was damp with sweat from the effort when she was done.
The sun was nearly set.
Harris and Trajan were there when she stood. She looked into their faces, and despite her earlier promises to herself that she would not cry, her cheeks were wet as she rose on her toes to hug them both. They held her for a long moment. She would have stayed that way, would have liked to end her life in the love and protection their embrace offered, but she had to complete the spell. The sun was setting.
She kissed them each in turn, then went to the center of the circle and lay down, staring up into the tree. They knelt on either side of her. There wasn’t much they could do now. They’d done what they could—and more than she would have imagined six months ago—by creating the powerful, multilayered sacred circle. It was writ in earth and life and air, the inside of it scribed with runes and power symbols. The circle was so strong that if someone had tried to enter, the magic they’d erected in not just a ground-level circle but in a full, closed sphere, it would be an actual, physical barrier. That was the hope of the spell—that she could hold the curse here, with her, until she was truly dead, her bones turned to ash, her body used to feed the small bugs in the soil inside the circle. The markings on Trajan and Harris would allow them to leave, but she would remain here, the curse, which was itself a living thing, withering and dying as her body decayed.