Feral Magic

by Nicolette Jinks

  I thumbed out Meredith’s number and pressed “send”.

  She answered on the very first ring. “Yes?”

  “I need in that room.”

  She knew which room. “Why?”

  “Fifth rule,” I reminded her, thinking of our contract.

  “‘Thou shalt not ask questions’,” mused Railey, her voice disconnected from where she appeared to be. It was our most cited rule, and I was considering bumping it up in the list just so people would pay it more attention.

  Meredith hissed. “And my condition was you can’t touch the room, he...”

  I waited for her to continue, but she did not. “Fine,” I said with a shrug in my voice, “We’re done here.”

  “Wait,” the woman’s voice was strained and almost panicked. “It hasn’t been three hours. Can you do something, anything at all?”

  “Meredith,” I said, using my fingers to count, “I read warding spells hidden on the doorways, Latin prayers under the cabinets, there are at least ten blessings stowed away under the furniture, and your mail is chock full of talk with other cleansers...”

  “What state is my house in, and who gave you permission to—”

  “You did when you signed the agreement. What matters is, your problem is still here, and unless you open the door, it is not going to go away.”

  The line was dead quiet, and for a moment I thought she had hung up. “I would if I could,” she said, “but...”

  “Your husband does not know you are doing this,” I guessed.

  “He won’t let anyone come.”

  “Why not?” I said as a cold breeze raced down my back.

  “He won’t tell me.”

  I swallowed hard and calmed my beating heart. “Who is your husband?”

  The line was quiet again. I should have asked that question the very first thing, but I’d taken her on her word that she was who she said she was. The money had blinded me.

  “You aren’t Meredith, are you?” I said, and when the line was quiet, I continued. “Please, tell me you aren’t Bliss Bernadette Cole, wife of Gregor Cole.”

  “I—I am sorry,” she stammered, then rushed, “you would have refused.”

  I was in Gregor’s house. I was in his house without his permission. There was a major problem in here, and if I made it out alive, no one would believe me because he was a ruling class purist and I was a sorceress cursed to a lifetime of being a lamb. No one would take me seriously, especially because I was tresspassing.

  “You’re right, I would have run away.” I ran my hand through the loose strands of my bun, charging for the secret door. “The magic laws say that only the head of household can invite people in. I’m trespassing, Bliss. And if I’m caught, he can do whatever he wants to do.”

  And I might as well do some damage before he caught me. I hung up and worked on pulling the battery out of my phone. “Railey, get that door.”

  I saw her pass into it, making it glow with soft blue. My phone started ringing a high-pitched and staticy noise that had the whispers of a spell underneath the racket. I crushed the red hot battery underfoot, then hurled the still-ringing phone into the wall. Shrieks and hisses came from Railey’s door just before her voice echoed in my ear, “Wards are gone.”

  And Gregor was coming. The house seemed to whisper it. Master was coming home. Master was coming home. Master was coming home. And I had only seconds to escape. A draft raced down my neck. Gregor was coming. I needed to get out of here. Who knew what he would do—he was a ruling class, he knew spells that had been forgotten. He was not afraid to use spells that most would blanch at. I could be his mind-slave. I could spend the rest of my days as a newt. I could be missing both my hands at the utterance of a single word. I needed to get out of here.

  But not yet. There was something big here, something much bigger than me. There was something I needed to be a part of, though I didn’t know how I knew. I just knew. I could make a mad dash for the window and use my compass trinket to get me someplace safe, spend some days on the run, and hope Gregor grew bored. Or I could open that door in front of me and do what I was called here to do.

  The front door opened and slammed on its hinges, shuddering the entire house. Railey cracked the door open for me, and I slipped in, pulling my charm bracelet around until I felt the amber pendant. Rubbing it made the bug illuminate as strong as any flashlight, though I could not see the entire room at once. The light switch did not work.

  “The walls!” called Railey, and I turned the light onto the writing, reading slowly as ever the spells inscribed there.

  “Skip ahead to here.” She tapped on the wall at a place where the symbols were different from the rest. Railey was kind enough to explain. “They’re colonial-era demonic. This spirit we’ve been chasing, it isn’t a spirit, or not a spirit alone. It is a spell, a spell guided by spirits trapped in it. Fera...this is one of the Unwrittens.”

  The Unwrittens were a set of curses or spells deemed so terrible that every recording of them was removed from existence. Or, it was supposed to have been. There were rumors about what those spells were, but I thought they were stories and little more.

  “There are...nine spirits woven into the spell,” said Railey, “They need four more.”

  An ebony desk with a leather bound spell book caught my gaze, and I walked over to it, mindful not to step into the magic circle drawn on the floor. The book title read Le Morte de Morgain, and a string of lacquered phalanges served as a bookmark; I opened the book, feeling a chilled finger run down my neck. I ignored the touch of the spirit and started reading, or rather, I started memorizing the words and characters to translate later. I dare not take the book; not only was there a risk of tripping spells, but these books tainted their caretakers, made them go mad, made them do the dark thoughts in their soul.

  This page marked three-quarters completion of a spell, and I couldn’t stop my fingers from backtracking, from looking at the previous steps. I paused, seeing a drawing of ceremonial bones carved with ash painted into them, trapping the souls so another could draw off their energy over extended periods of time. Unlike custom with standard books, magic books would make room in the text for their users to record their spell making, becoming a series of journals as well as an educational text. Gregor Cole kept very detailed records, and had a surprisingly crafted hand at drawing.

  “Railey,” I whispered, my lips numb. “That’s the house.”

  The house she died at. The house where I lost my magic. And the date...the date was the day we went there.

  “Fera,” whispered Railey, though it should have been a scream, “Run! The spirits, they’re on me...”

  I might not have magic, and I might not be the best at understanding spells, but I knew it was connected to this book. Fistful by fistful, I yanked out pages, tearing and maiming as many as I could. A ghost hand reached about my throat and squeezed, an uncomfortable sensation but not life threatening.

  Screams and wails buzzed my ears, clouding my hearing so I did not know Gregor was near until the door exploded in flying slivers, embedding in my back.

  Gregor’s frame filled the doorway, tall and lean with an almost awkwardly large head and hawk like nose. He wore a long, black cloak and black shirt and pants, black hair, and nearly black eyes.

  “What have we here?” His voice was like oil, cool and slippery. “Trespassers.”

  I couldn’t see Railey. I couldn’t hear her. I couldn’t feel her. They had her, the spirits in the spell, and I was not sure when it had happened. Heart pounding, I unlatched my charm bracelet shaking on my wrist, my final—and only—line of defense against a sorcerer; it was an old bracelet, and the trinkets were unstable. Unstable trinkets exploded in the right circumstance.

  Gregor raised his short staff, and the tip turned red. No sooner had I hurled my bracelet than he shot a black ball at me; the two connected midair, and a series of cracks and booms illuminated the room, casting us both back through space. I hurt. I hurt bad. G
regor’s spell injured me something terrible, but I didn’t know how just yet. My heart had stopped, but maybe it was my imagination. He himself was splayed across the hall, unmoving for now.

  Ears ringing, panting, and in painless shock, I seized my compass and urged it, “Go! Go!”

  I didn’t tell it where to go, I couldn’t keep my focus long enough. The compass was created with magic, and it obeyed whoever held it; it was good for one person, but I didn’t like to use it as it left Railey behind and it took her a couple of weeks to find me again. Instead of watching the dial glow and spin as I usually loved to do, I instead panicked over myself. Though I breathed, though I thought, though I still moved, I could still not feel my heart. Clutching my chest, the world turned to night with the rushing wind taking me up in its arms.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I was at that house again, the house where Railey had died. I felt different, devoid of pain, light, as though my limbs were no longer tugging down on me. Either I was dead or dying, or majorly hallucinating. There wasn’t much to do but to wait it out and try to make sense of what was happening, and of what had happened.

  “Railey!” I called, but no sound came from my throat. I shuddered at the emptiness about me, at how I felt like there was a creature out there hunting me down. Spinning, I saw no one on the streets, no cars on the road, no birds in the sky; the curtain drew aside in the house, and a face peered at me, then it smiled, a predatory grin with sharp teeth, then flung the tattered curtain back into place. Black goo oozed from the house like a tree bleeding sap.

  By the garden gate, a skeletal hand broke through the earth, pulling up a decomposing corpse out of the ground. I shuddered and withdrew, but not far. The corpse jerked at the end of its shackles and cried out a noise that grated my ears and made my chest shake.

  “Help,” it said, a scratchy noise, “help us.”

  “How?” I asked, and I found myself suddenly right in front of it, though I did not remember moving from my place by the walkway. This close, the house smelled of burnt flesh, and I wanted to get away from it. The corpse in front of me seemed more human now, more like the freshly-dead variety.

  “We are here,” he said, reaching for my forehead. I could not pull back as his fingers went through my skull and made my head tingle, then bolt with electricity. A dozen places flashed through my mind’s eye, as though I was recalling my first apartments. He pulled back his hand, and I felt lost, stranded in the midst of nothingness, and very, very alone. The man in front of me sighed and grew transparent, faint to the point where I could barely make him out past the background.

  “Run,” he whispered. “Run, the monster comes.”

  I followed the direction he seemed to point, down the hill towards the park, and I saw a shadow there the size of a large dog. Railey had mentioned to me about the spirit monsters she faced down on several occasions, but she said she only knew how to fight them because her grandmother had come to teach her survival when Railey made the choice to stay by my side. I knew I should run, like the man said, but I could not unglue my legs from that lawn, watching in mute terror as the monster came closer.

  It was much bigger than it originally appeared, fifteen feet tall and twice as long, lumbering along with a tail scraping gouges into the concrete, its toothy head swinging on a skinny neck, wings resting on its back. It saw me and laughed, walking straight through the falling picket fence, its laugh made of hundreds of voices crying together...and I heard Railey’s voice among them.

  “Railey!” I cried out, and this time I made a noise. “Let her go!”

  The shadow dragon laughed again, leaning over me, huffing out breaths that pushed me several inches back.

  “I am hungry,” it rumbled, opening its jaw and reaching for me. “I need four more...”

  A crow dove from the air and hit the dragon upside the head; I expected the crow to bounce harmlessly off, but instead the dragon crumpled under the blow, rolling into the porch with a bellow of pain. It swatted its tail, and held still.

  “Caw, caw!” The crow landed in front of me, swept a bow, and said, “Miss Feraline Swift?”

  “Y-yes?” I said, confused that my white night in shining armor would turn out to be none other than a black crow who would save me after I had died.

  “Come with me,” he said, turning and flaring out his tail feathers as though he wanted me to grab them. The shadow dragon was stirring and I didn’t want to face it without a weapon, so I obliged the crow by grabbing his feathers.

  The crow hopped and pulled me through the air with it, bobbing up and down at first, then up. We cleared the neighbor’s house where a reptilian thing darted on the roof, and kept going, the wind blinding my eyes. I was buffeted one way then the other, feeling my legs get pulled and yanked, my eyes tear up from the stinging wind, but I held firm to the crow’s tail feathers. I did not know what would happen to me if I let go, but I was determined to not find out. The longer we flew, the more I hurt. My arms ached, my legs cramped, my head throbbed, and my eyes stung so much I wanted to wipe them, but I did not dare to let go.

  At last, I felt the crow slow as though to land, but the landing was much harder than the take-off. I crashed into grass, crushing my chest and jarring every bone in my body. I cleared my eyes, feeling like I should be heaving, and looked around me.

  I was in a park; the park near the house, actually, and it had not changed but for areas where shadows moved without anything to cast them. Pulling myself up onto my favorite bench, I clutched my burning chest and tried to breathe, glad that the shadows kept their distance from me.

  The crow hopped up to join me, morphing into a man with chin-length hair, kind eyes, and sharp features. He smiled, brushed dust off his slacks, and then gave my back a good thump that rattled my teeth and took away the urge to breathe. His hair still had a couple of black feathers in it, and he shook them out then gave me a winning smile.

  “You are a tough one to kill, Miss Fera,” he said cheerfully, pulling a pipe out of his vest and taking a puff.

  “Who—who—?” I couldn’t talk, but he knew what I was going to say. The man smiled, a warm smile, and offered me a small flask. I took a swig, and coughed when I found it was wine.

  He said, “How rude of me. You must forgive my manners, it has been a hundred years since I last spoke to a recruit. I am Death—or Michael if you so prefer—and you, my dear, are very nicely dead. I must admit, I admire your style. Yours was a good, clean death with minimal damage to your earthly body combined with a way to get it away from those who would injure it. It makes me all the more certain that you were the correct choice for my new agent.”

  “Agent?” I repeated, numb, “Do you mean like the grim reaper?”

  He laughed, a noise light and scratchy but pleasantly so, “No, you don’t fit into that line of work. Tell me, what would you do if you were alive again, right now?”

  “I’d save Railey and get rid of that Unwritten spell.” But he knew that already, and I realized it was not only why he chose me, but what made me perfect for whatever it was that agents did. “Does this mean I am immortal?”

  Death smiled again, and he did not need to tell me that the answer was most definitely a ‘no’. “If you cease before your hour glass is empty, I will pick my next agent from your friends and family.”

  “I’m a replacement for your last agent?” I was guessing, but it seemed my guess was correct. In this strange dream-like world, it only made sense. If I woke up again, I was going to have a hard time believing any of this.

  “Difficult role to fill.” He sighed.

  “What do I do?”

  “Uphold the laws of the universe. Simple things like making sure the dead stay dead and the living don’t become undead. But don’t go chasing after vampires and zombies, I send the less important agents to do that. No, I need you to foil evil schemes and that sort of thing.”

  I had no clue what to say to that.

  He snapped his fingers. “Speaking of which, d
rink this, close your eyes and count to thirteen.”

  He handed me a flask; I smelled it and poured a little into my palm. It was Merlot. I frowned at him, but he nodded encouragingly, so drank it in three gulps and closed my eyes.

  “One, two, three, four, five...” I was starting to have a heavy sensation about me again, but I couldn’t stop counting. My words echoed in my ears as I seemed to float, the heavy floating feeling that I get during the depths of a bad flu. “...eight....nine...ten...”

  CHAPTER FOUR