Ugh. The absolute last person in the world Crys wanted to spend any time thinking about was Farrell Grayson. He was a rich kid from a family of Hawkspear members, known for his misdeeds and arrests more than anything else. He wasn’t a nice guy even before he was a society member, even before he received his marks. But now he was really bad news. He’d recently tried to get close to Crys—but only because Markus had ordered him to. Crys had been poking around the society, trying to find out secrets about Markus and her father in case it might help save Becca.
And, unfortunately for her, before she found out that every time his lips moved it was either because there was a cigarette between them or he was lying, she’d really started to like Farrell.
Crys was ashamed at how easily he’d been able to manipulate her, which was why she’d kept the details of their brief association mostly to herself. But even now, if she were honest, she still found herself wanting to make excuses for everything Farrell did and all he lied about. She’d catch herself blaming what he’d done on his marks—after all, they were the same marks Jackie once had, before her aunt became pregnant with Markus’s half-immortal child, when they’d become null and void.
But despite all that, Crys always came back to the one sure thing she knew about Farrell: Some of the things he’d done were unforgiveable.
“I’m going out on the balcony,” Jackie said, thankfully pulling Crys out of her unwanted memories. “I need some air.”
Crys offered her a bag of potato chips. “Hungry?”
“No.” But she grabbed them anyway and left the kitchen just as Julia returned.
“I found something, Crys,” Julia said. “You’ve been hiding things from me.”
Her stomach sank. What was she in trouble for now?
“What?”
“This.” Julia pulled a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket. Crys recognized it immediately: the flyer advertising a photography show at a nearby gallery, which she’d thrown away when she’d cleaned out her purse earlier that morning. “Andrea Stone. She’s your favorite photographer, isn’t she?”
Andrea Stone was known for her portraits. She traveled the world to find her subjects, none of them models or professionals. Real people with interesting faces, wrinkles, moles, warts, and all. Her work had been featured more than a dozen times on the cover of National Geographic, and Crys had every issue in her personal collection.
Favorite photographer was putting it mildly. Primary inspiration and idol? That was more like it.
“I’m surprised you know that,” Crys said quietly, taking the flyer from her.
“Maybe I know more about you than you think I do.”
“That’s kind of scary.”
Julia grinned. “The show is ending soon.”
“I know. But unfortunately I can’t go. It’s just that I’d much rather stay here and play Monopoly or stare blankly at the walls for hours on end.”
“Nope. Think again. You’re going, and I’m coming with you. Tomorrow.”
Crys snapped her head up and met her mom’s gaze. “I’m sorry, I must have you confused with someone else. I thought you were my overprotective mother who loves rules and would never risk my safety for something as silly as the chance to view the life-changing work of my one true career role model.”
“I am your overprotective mother, and I’m taking you to this photography show.”
Crys’s heart skipped a beat. For the first time in quite a while, a genuine, goofy grin broke out on her face. But it fell almost as quickly as it arrived. “What about Markus?” she said. “Aren’t you afraid he might find us?”
Julia sighed. “I believe that Markus is able to find us whenever he likes, wherever we are.”
That was a deeply unsettling thought. “Are you serious?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Still, the security is better here than back at the shop—for now, anyway. But I swear to God, if he decides to show his ancient face and ruin something I damn well know you’ve been looking forward to, I will personally claw his eyes out.”
Crys regarded her mother with nothing short of shock. “I think that’s the most badass thing you’ve ever said.”
“From you, I’ll take that as the highest compliment. Our stay here is only temporary. It was never a safe haven, that’s not why we came here. We have the book, and Jackie is ready to destroy it if necessary. Markus knows that. He’s weak. Dying. He wouldn’t dare make a move against us unless he already had the book in his hands.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Cautious now, are we?” Julia said, a smile reappearing on her face and her eyes sparkling with mischief. “Come on, let’s break out of this dump and go to the show tomorrow. What do you say?”
Crys could barely believe this was really happening. “Um. I say hell yes!”
“Jackie!” Dr. Vega shouted from the study. “Julia! Come here immediately. The book—THE BOOK!”
Her excitement about the show disappearing all at once, Crys pulled Jackie off the balcony, and both of them rushed after Julia to the study.
“What’s wrong?” Jackie demanded. “What happened?”
Dr. Vega looked up at them, his wide eyes magnified behind his thick, round glasses. “The book is changing.”
“What do you mean, changing?”
“Right as I studied this page, the text . . . shifted. It changed. Right before my eyes!” He shuffled through a stack of photocopies, picking one and jabbing his finger at it. “Look! Here is a photocopy of this very page.”
They drew closer. Crys looked from the photocopy to the leather-bound Codex, which lay open on the desk. At the center of both the photocopy and the original page was an illustration of a plant bearing purple flowers. But the text—both the format and the individual words—now varied wildly between the two, and at the very top of the book page, where there was once nothing but black-and-white writing, was a new illustration of a sun.
“Um. Is the sun . . . glowing?” Crys whispered as the black ink shifted to a golden shade, and light began to emanate from the parchment as if illuminated from within the fibers of the paper itself.
“What’s going on?”
Crys’s gaze shot to the doorway, where Becca now stood, still wrapped in her fuzzy blue bathrobe.
Her eyes were full and glowing with the same golden light.
Chapter 3
BECCA
One of Angus’s many books was a dream encyclopedia. Becca leafed through it, hoping to find some answers about her recent nightmares. She’d wanted to dream about Maddox since she’d returned from Mytica, but the nightmare Crys had woken her from had been too real, too violent, too horrible. Her hands still shook from it.
But then she felt it—something else entirely.
It was a sensation deep inside of her, an urgency she couldn’t ignore. Something was drawing her out of the library, down the stairs, and before she knew it she stood at the doorway to the study without even knowing why she was there.
“What’s going on?” she asked, but even to herself, her voice sounded dreamy and faraway.
Her family and Dr. Vega all looked at her, expressions of surprise on their faces.
She wasn’t sure if they answered her or not, because suddenly all she could see was the book.
The Bronze Codex.
She hadn’t seen it since the night she woke up back in Toronto, Markus King, her father, and Crys standing over her. She’d been so out of it then that she hadn’t been able to register much. All she could do was blindly obey when Crys told her to run.
Since then, everyone had been treating her with kid gloves. And it didn’t take psychic abilities for her to get the funny feeling that she was the main topic of hushed conversation in their temporary lodging. Her family and Dr. Vega spoke in whispers, and whenever Becca entered a room, they’d go quiet and look guilty. She tried very hard not to let it bother her, but how could it not?
Becca Hatcher: the crazy girl who claimed her spirit went on v
acation to another world. Was that how they saw her?
Brain fuzzy, gaze locked on the leather-bound book, she stood there in the threshold for what felt like a very long time.
It’s calling to me, she thought suddenly. It wanted me to come here.
“Becca?” came the sound of her name, but it was soft, like an echo underwater.
Did anyone else even realize how beautiful the Codex was? From the moment the book had arrived at the Speckled Muse, she’d felt an inexplicable but nonetheless immediate connection with it. She couldn’t read its language—not in the traditional sense, at least. She didn’t know what it was that day, of course, but she’d still felt oddly—how to explain it?—protective of it.
That feeling had never entirely gone away, but right now it was stronger than ever before.
That book belonged to her, no one else.
“Becca, I’m seriously going to slap you if you don’t say something.”
“Don’t say that, Crys.”
“Mom, look at her. She’s, like, possessed or something.”
“Becca, honey.” Becca barely felt her aunt touch her shoulder, but the pressure was enough to make her raise her chin and see Jackie at her side, peering at her warily. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” Becca murmured. “But you should know, there’s a spirit trapped in the hawk.”
“Okay, now she’s seriously talking crazy,” Crys said.
Ignoring her sister, she focused on a memory of Maddox using his magic to pull a dark and violent spirit away from her. He’d trapped that spirit in a piece of metal—the bronze hawk on the cover of the Codex.
With the spirit trapped inside of it, the metal had given off an aura so bone-chillingly cold it felt as if it could freeze her very soul.
But today the book ushered in a warming sensation. An aura that felt welcoming. Sparkly, even, like a pleasant shiver down one’s spine. The sensation shifted to an image: somewhere that was big, vast, and endless, sprawling over miles. Hundreds, thousands of miles.
Rolling meadows of green grass, jewel-like flowers of every shade and size, and a city made from crystal that sparkled like diamonds under the sun . . .
In three swift, thudding motions, Dr. Vega slammed the Codex shut, dropped it in a desk drawer, and locked it with a key.
She felt a cold pain hit her, as if an elastic band had suddenly snapped inside her brain, and she gasped. After the pain cleared, her mind finally did the same, and she looked up at her family with a wide, wondering gaze.
“Thank God.” Crys sighed. Her face was pale and drawn. “No more glowy eyes. I don’t like the glowy eyes at all. It’s not a good look for you.”
“My eyes were glowing?” Becca asked, her throat thick.
“Like lightbulbs from hell.”
The haze was gone, but something else had replaced it—an intense need to see the book again. To touch it, to hold it. It was like an itch that needed to be scratched.
Julia hushed Crys and helped Becca into a nearby chair. She pushed the blond hair off of her daughter’s forehead and smiled at her.
“Well, that was rather dramatic, wasn’t it?” Julia glanced over at Jackie. “What do you make of it?”
Jackie just watched them, her expression troubled, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. “I wish like hell I knew.”
“Perhaps we should ask Becca herself,” suggested Dr. Vega.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Jackie replied.
Becca glared at her. She couldn’t help it. She loathed when people talked about her—or worse, spoke for her—as if she weren’t even there.
She’d only met Dr. Vega yesterday, but she liked him quite a lot. She knew how Crys felt about him—that he was abrupt, scatterbrained, and perhaps a little too eccentric—but Becca thought he was kind of funny. He wanted to learn much more about her experience with the book, but Jackie and Julia—and Crys—had told him she still needed some time to recover before he could grill her about it. She appreciated that Dr. Vega didn’t look at her like she was just a fifteen-year-old kid; the couple of times he’d talked to her so far, she’d felt respected. Like a peer.
Then again, maybe it was more like a lab rat. She thought of him slamming the Codex in the desk drawer just moments ago. Perhaps it was too soon to tell whose side Dr. Vega was on.
“I do think it’s a good idea,” Becca said to Jackie. “I want to help if I can. The more you learn about that book, the better you’ll be able to figure out why it has these effects on me, right? And why it doesn’t seem to have any effect on anyone else.”
“You are exactly right,” Dr. Vega said, giving her a toothy grin. He pushed his glasses up higher on his nose, then reached for a pen and notebook. “Excellent. Let’s begin.”
Julia shook her head. “I don’t know. Are you sure you feel up to this, Becca?”
Her mother was actually giving her a choice in the matter. That was new. And appreciated. “Yes. Seriously, Mom, I want to help.”
Jackie and Julia shared a concerned look.
“All right,” Julia said. “But promise you’ll stop if it gets to be too much, okay?”
“Promise.” Becca shifted in her seat. “Where should I start, Dr. Vega? At the beginning, when my spirit left my body and went to another world? Or start from just a couple of minutes ago when that book turned me into a zombie?”
Vega raised his bushy brows. “Is that what it felt like to you? That you were a zombie?”
She thought back. “All I know is that I was upstairs in the library, reading, and then, suddenly, I was here. Like my legs were thinking for themselves. So zombie might be the wrong word, but . . . it also feels pretty accurate.” Becca paused, not sure if putting this strange experience into words made her feel more relieved or more nervous. She looked up at Crys. “You said my eyes were glowing?”
“Yeah,” said Crys, and Becca was both surprised and grateful that she didn’t follow that up with a snarky joke this time.
Dr. Vega scribbled something down in his notebook, then sent a cautious glance at Julia and Jackie, both of whom stared at Becca with a perturbed look in their eyes. “May we continue?” he said.
Julia twisted her hands. “Yes. Please do. We all need to know more.”
He nodded solemnly. “All right, Becca. I have previously hypothesized that this book is the gateway to another world. And from what little I know of your experience, you can confirm that. Yes?”
“Well, yes”—Dr. Vega beamed—“and no.” And just like that, the doctor’s face fell again. Becca went on. “When I was . . . away, I learned that the book contained magic spells from a race of immortal beings.”
The statement would have been met with disbelief anywhere else, but here it was different.
“Like Markus,” Julia said under her breath uneasily. Jackie remained silent.
“Immortal beings who dwell in another world called . . .” Vega flipped through his previous notes excitedly. Becca was about to help him out when the professor looked up, eyes wide. “Mytica.”
Becca nodded. “I got the impression that most of the immortals live in another world, an entirely different one set apart from where I was. There were only two immortals in Mytica while I was there. The people thought of them as goddesses.”
Vega scribbled away furiously. “And both of those goddesses—did they practice magic?”
“Well, I only saw one of them.” She remembered the horrible demon with the face of an angel. “Valoria. It’s said she has the powers of earth and water. The one I never saw is the goddess of the South. Cleiona. She does magic with fire and air.”
Vega’s eyes grew wider, full of amazement. “Elemental magic, yes. How absolutely fascinating! You saw some of this magic at work?”
Becca nodded. “Valoria . . . she could control snakes. She could turn people into plants.” She shivered. “She could . . . she could summon this kind of mud, and it would pull you right down to your death. And . . . and when Maddox was
this close to defeating her, she turned herself into a funnel of water and escaped. I was there. I saw it.”
“Maddox? And Maddox is . . . ?”
Becca chewed her bottom lip. “He’s . . . a boy. From Mytica. He’s about sixteen years old and he also has magic, but it’s not like the goddesses’. It was . . . uh . . . death magic is what they called it. His father called him a necromancer, which is why he could see and talk to me. He was the only one who could. His father is a regular man, but his mother is an immortal.”
Becca took a sidelong peek and saw Jackie and Julia exchange a grave look. She wondered if they believed her now, or if, like Crys, they thought her story was nothing more than a vivid dream brought on by a coma.
It happened, she assured herself. It was real. Maddox was real.
He is real.
Shaking off any concerns about whether or not her family believed her, she continued. “Valoria had the Bronze Codex there. Except they called it something else—the Book of the Immortals. Valoria needed Maddox’s magic to work a spell that would open a gateway to our world, where another immortal had been exiled. She wanted to get to our world so she could get to this man, who had stolen a golden dagger from her that she wanted back.”
“Markus,” Jackie breathed. “The dagger. His dagger. That’s where it came from.”
Becca nodded. “Markus is immortal, so he can read the language the book is written in. Which means he also knows how to use the magic in it.”
Once again, the conclusion seemed too simple, too plain: The Bronze Codex was simply a book of spells. Why, then, did this little feeling that it was so much more than that keep gnawing at Becca deep inside?
“Well,” Crys said, nodding, and Becca knew that her vacation from sarcasm was over. “I think it was really swell of your new boyfriend to toss the book into our world. It’s kind of cute, really. Like Toronto is his own private garbage can for hazardous magical materials. And there’s a spirit trapped in it too? Awesome!”
Becca glared at her. “As if you even believe anything I’ve said.”
The Darkest Magic (A Book of Spirits and Thieves) Page 4