The Darkest Magic

by Morgan Rhodes

  “So you’re able to resist this . . . compulsion? You want to resist it?”

  “I was able to for the short time you listened to me and stayed away. But of all the mansions in all the world, you had to break into this one.” He allowed a grin to stretch across his face.

  Her eyes were now fixed on the dagger. “So now what?”

  “That seems to be the question of the hour. Now what? Well, let’s see. I don’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to impulse control. If I feel lousy, I have a drink. If I’m bored, I have a cigarette. Rinse and repeat. Resisting temptation has never been in my nature.”

  “Let me leave, and we can pretend this never happened.”

  “Sorry, but we’re about five minutes too late for that. Now, how about that head start I mentioned? Let’s make it a game of hide-and-seek. You hide, I’ll seek. When I find you, I promise to make it quick and as painless as possible, and you promise to stop being a problem for me for the rest of eternity.”

  Farrell stepped away from the doorway, leaving it clear and open. He was waiting for her to argue with him or give him a pep talk about how he could fight this thing and come out on the other side happier and healthier for it.

  But she didn’t. Instead, she just narrowed her eyes at him. “I need that dagger.”

  “Really? That’s what you choose for your famous last words?”

  Without another word, she ran past him and out of the room in a flash. He’d forgotten how fast she was when she was running away from him.

  He sighed. “This really isn’t a healthy relationship we have,” he said to himself. “Oh well.”

  Dagger in hand, he slowly counted to ten.

  As he stood there, he tried to remember why he’d been fighting this but found that he couldn’t. Crys Hatcher was a problem for him and had been pretty much from the first moment he’d met her, when he’d been trying to charm his way into learning all her secrets about why she was looking into the Hawkspear Society. But when she’d blown him off like he was just some ordinary guy . . .

  She’d become an actual challenge.

  Farrell liked challenges. For a little while, anyway.

  But could you even call it a challenge if she wanted so little to do with him that this whole thing was one-sided? His nagging conscience was trying to remind him that she was out of his league, special in a way he would never be, and that she had every right to curse the moment she met him.

  He squashed that little voice inside of him. His conscience had gotten smaller and smaller in recent days, but for now he still carried it around with him, like a sharp pebble in his shoe.

  “What are you waiting for?” the much more helpful voice of Connor chimed in. “Go get her.”

  Game on.

  Slowly, he left the library and made his way through the halls. Hide-and-seek had been his and his brothers’ favorite game ten years ago. Farrell had always won—he was killer at both hiding and seeking.

  Killer.

  Yes, you’re a killer, not-Connor whispered. No reason to deny it. Embrace it. Your marks make you stronger and better. You know this.

  Farrell tightened his grip on the dagger.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he called. He didn’t think she’d go immediately for an exit, considering how much she wanted the dagger. More than likely she was so delusional that right now she was trying to figure out a way to incapacitate him.

  Or kill him.

  But he was expecting that, and he’d be prepared. His senses were so keen that he could pick out the quiet tick of the grandfather clock in that distant room. He could see the faint prints of Crys’s shoes in the hallway rug.

  He followed the footprints.

  “Hey, Crys, I’ve changed my mind,” he called out. “Let’s drop this cat-and-mouse game and order a pizza. What do you say? We could watch a movie, discuss life, the meaning of the universe. It’ll be fun!”

  Or maybe they could have story time. He’d tell her the one about how he’d watched the life leave Daniel Hatcher’s eyes as he’d twisted the knife. About how, at that moment, a part of Farrell had screamed for him to stop, but he didn’t. He couldn’t.

  That he wasn’t sure whether or not he believed in souls, but that he was certain he’d lost a very important piece of himself in that moment—a piece that he knew he would never get back.

  It didn’t matter. Power was all that mattered to him now. Doing whatever Markus commanded was all that mattered.

  “That’s right,” not-Connor urged him on. “The marks are a good thing, not a bad thing. They make you better. Markus chose you to receive the fourth mark—he saw the greatness in you. He knew you were strong enough to help him.”

  “But not strong enough to resist his command,” he muttered.

  “You want this,” Connor argued. “Doing this will free you from your weaknesses.”

  Yes, of course he was right. Farrell’s weaknesses disgusted him, and he wanted them gone forever. No matter what it took.

  The trail of her intoxicating strawberry scent kept leading him on this silent journey through the hallways of Markus’s house. Finally, he heard something. A click. Another click, and then a clack.

  She’d found the kitchen. And there she hunted for a weapon.

  Of course she would fight. Crys had never struck him as the type to wedge herself into a small space and spend her remaining time praying to whatever god might be listening to save her.

  He approached the kitchen and watched her riffle through the utensils, her back to him. “Finding anything useful?” he asked, leaning against the doorframe.

  She froze. Slowly at first, and then suddenly picking up speed, she turned around and threw something at him. It was headed right for his head, but he deflected it easily.

  “Was that a fork?” he asked, frowning as it fell to the ground with a clatter. “Seriously, Crys?”

  “You know what?” she said, breathless. “I’ll admit it. I did like you in the beginning. More than a little.”

  “Wow, that’s quite a change of subject, isn’t it? Go on, though. I’m fascinated.”

  “What were the chances of me bumping into the infamous Farrell Grayson—twice. Me. I thought it was, like, fate, the two of us meeting like that.”

  “Soul mates, did you think?”

  “No. I don’t believe in soul mates.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  “Especially not when I figured out that there was nothing fateful about those meetings. That you planned them, like some sort of evil stalker.”

  Farrell rolled his eyes. “What were you saying about liking me?”

  “Guys don’t usually notice me. Probably because I work really hard at not being noticed.”

  “Says the girl with the platinum blond hair and obnoxious T-shirts.”

  “You think those things matter? That they attract any sort of real attention? If anything, they just make it easier for me to play a part: the quirky, artsy girl that you can judge by her appearance and then move on. All the while I hide behind my camera, and I observe. It’s way safer there, but I can still pretend like I’m out in the world, experiencing life just like anyone else.”

  “Someone got bitten by the philosophy bug, huh? Are you trying to distract me? Sorry, but it won’t work. We played our game: You hid—poorly—and I sought. Here we are. And now it’s time to take this relationship to the next level. For you, that’ll be heaven.”

  “See? You do the same thing. I hide behind my camera, and you hide behind your jokes—which aren’t even slightly funny, by the way. We’ve got that in common. Hiding.”

  “Wow, Crys, I really appreciate this insight into my inner psyche. But I have to say, I’m getting a little impatient. Where were we?” He took a step closer to her. She backed away until she hit the wall behind her, then pressed her hands back against it as if might give way to an escape route.

  “For a few days, though, before I figured out what was really going on, I tho
ught you liked me too. Insane, right? Farrell Grayson pursuing Crys Hatcher, even trying to impress her by taking her to a fancy bar for a fancy cocktail. Buying her a new camera. Making her feel important.” She shook her head. “But there was always a small part of me that knew it had to be a lie. And when I found out it was, do you know how I felt?”

  “Heartbroken?”

  “Relieved. And this”—she glanced down at the dagger, and when her eyes met his again, they were void of emotion and cold as ice—“doesn’t surprise me at all. You’re scum, Farrell. You could never deserve somebody like me. Somebody real. Where would a person like that even fit into your great big fake life? There’s no way. It’s impossible. And I think you know it.”

  Ugh. Was she ever going to stop talking? “You’ve really got a strange idea of what it means to beg for your life.”

  “I’m not begging. I’m saying what I have to say. You do what you have to do. You loser. You mindless minion.” She spat at him.

  He grimaced and wiped the saliva off his cheek.

  Mindless minion.

  Nobody spoke to Farrell Grayson like this. And nobody spit on him.

  Nobody.

  “But you let Mom slap you last night,” Connor said. “I doubt you’d let that happen again.”

  “Thanks so much for that, Crys,” he said. “That helped more than you might think.”

  He moved even closer to her, close enough to feel her body heat, as he leaned over her shoulder with his left arm, bracing himself against the wall with his hand. He looked at her, training all five senses onto her. This pissed-off, angry, and totally unafraid thing might just be part of some act, some desperate attempt to fool him.

  But he could see it, the fear, bottomless in her ghostly blue eyes.

  He was certain he would remember that look for the rest of his life. However long that might be.

  “I’m nobody’s damn minion,” he snarled, and then, with the force of every scrap of strength he had within him, he plunged the blade down, breaking the skin, hitting bone . . .

  Impaling his own hand to the wall.

  Crys’s eyes were squeezed shut. She let out a little shriek, her body cringing as if instinctively from the dagger, but after a few moments she grew silent and still. She blinked, opening her eyes, and then stared up at him. She turned around and saw his hand, pinned to the wall by the golden blade, dripping blood.

  She scrambled away from him, ducking down and away from the cage his body had made for her. “What the hell?” she gasped. “What is this? What have you done?”

  The pain was exquisite. Exquisitely horrible, especially when doubled by the wound on his arm, searing and screaming anew now. But the act had managed to clear his mind just enough to get a little bit of control over Markus’s hold on him. “What does it look like? I just stabbed myself in my damn hand.”

  “Why?”

  Because when my mother slapped me, it cleared my head, he thought. Pain helps me regain control over myself.

  Not-Connor had no immediate response to this realization.

  “Would you rather I had stabbed you?” Farrell said out loud as he grimaced, watching as his blood trickled down the floral wallpaper. “Because that’s what would have happened if I didn’t do this to myself.”

  “I thought that was your plan all along.”

  “Yeah, me too. But plans change.” He glared at her. “Why are you still here? Why aren’t you running for the front door as fast as you can like you should have done ten minutes ago? You’re still hoping for that dagger, aren’t you? Trust me, it’s not worth it. You really don’t want to be around me right now.”

  “Oh, I think I got the memo on that. Loud and clear.”

  “Aw, you’re mixing your metaphors. How adorable.” He eyed her warily as she moved closer to him. “What are you doing?”

  Crys grasped the hilt of the dagger and, grimacing, pulled it out of his hand. Immediately, he clasped his injured hand against his chest, giving her a very dark look. “You know how in horror movies, there are those girls who hear a weird noise and stupidly decide to go down to the basement to check it out, and then they get torn apart by a monster? Welcome to Hollywood, Hatcher.”

  “You like thinking of yourself as the monster, don’t you?” she sneered, grabbing a dishtowel from the counter. Farrell thought she might give it to him, to help his bleeding wound, but instead she just wiped the blood off the dagger’s blade. “But you just proved that you’re not.”

  “All I proved was that I had a single moment of doubt. It won’t happen again. Look”—he held out his hand to her—“the memory of that little fleeting moment is already fading.”

  She gasped as she watched the wound begin to heal and close before their eyes. “Holy crap.”

  “The gift with purchase of my soul. One of the many perks of being a mindless minion.”

  Suddenly, something hit him hard in the gut. Whatever it was was invisible to him, but it knocked him right to his knees all the same. He cried out in pain, doubling over.

  The pain left him in seconds, but so did his strength. He found that he could barely move.

  “See this right here?” he mumbled from his prone position. “Another perfect cue for you to start running away.”

  “What the hell is happening to you?”

  He knew exactly what the hell was happening to him, but he wasn’t ready to share that with her.

  Something had happened to Markus—something bad. The fourth mark that connected them shared Farrell’s energy, his very life, with the Hawkspear leader.

  “Having a lousy day so far, that’s all,” he grunted.

  “Looks like more than that to me.”

  A flash of jagged, fragmented images sliced through his mind, each one fleeting and more painful than the last. A breakfast spread on a long table. Becca’s pale, frightened face. Worn wooden floorboards. Bright lights shining down from far overhead. Markus clenching his fists on the table before slumping down on top of it, staring off, dead-eyed, at a sea of red seats.

  And then Damen Winter’s cold, bottomless eyes burning darkly in his chalk-white face.

  “Farrell! Snap out of it!” Crys was yelling at him and nudging him, not all that gently, with her sneaker.

  With a painful snap, the images in his head disappeared. Now the only pain he felt was concentrated in his burning forearm.

  “Has anyone ever told you what great bedside manner you have?” He clutched his head and eyed the dagger in Crys’s hands as he tried to sit up. He didn’t like that she still had possession of the blade, for too many reasons to count.

  “What just happened?” she demanded. “You stared mumbling something about Becca. And Markus. And a dungeon. What was that?”

  He paused to work it over in his head, trying to decide if this had been his imagination or an actual vision brought on by the fourth mark. His imagination was usually much kinder to him. “I think I know where they are.”

  “You know where Markus is?” Crys gasped. “Where Becca is?”

  He closed his eyes, trying so hard to focus, to find that strange—if painful—connection again. But it was gone.

  Still, he’d seen enough. “I think so.” He then let out a very small, very humorless laugh. “Why, you believe that I might have some kind of magical connection to Markus that might help lead the way?”

  “I don’t know what I believe anymore, to tell you the truth. All I know right now is that, unbelievable or not, it’s the best lead we have. Where are they?” Her expression softened. “Please, Farrell. You have to tell me.”

  “Markus’s theater.”

  She inhaled sharply. “I need to go there.”

  “Lucky for you, I know where it is.”

  Crys left the kitchen suddenly. Farrell slowly went after her, feeling the full extent of his exhaustion now, as if someone had just pushed a brick wall on top of him and left him for dead right after he’d finished running a marathon.

  He followed Crys back to th
e library. She was at the desk, fishing around in her purse, which she’d left on top of it. She pulled out a phone.

  “What are you doing?” he asked weakly.

  She held her finger up to him and began speaking into the phone. “Angus? It’s Crys. Jackie was arrested this morning—they came to the penthouse with a warrant. She thinks Markus told them, but I don’t know how they knew . . . that’s the least of our problems right now. Anyway, it means that you have to deal with me until Dr. Vega can bail her out. I have the dagger. Call me back if you ever want to get your hands on it.”

  She pressed the red button on her screen and looked at Farrell.

  “First,” he began, “your aunt’s been arrested?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t elaborate.

  “Second, who the hell is Angus?”

  “A thief. And though he doesn’t come right out and say it, I’m pretty sure he’s also a hired assassin. He’s also Jackie’s friend, and he’s going to help us get Becca back.”

  “Us?”

  Crys narrowed her eyes a bit. “I’m sorry, I was under the assumption that you wanted to free your lord and master. Especially now that you’ve got this nifty little magical bond with him.”

  He hissed out a breath. “Why do . . . we need Angus’s help?”

  “Jackie thinks he’s trustworthy and all he wants to do is help. But I know what he wants.” She held up the dagger to the light streaming through the window. “Shiny, magical objects that he can sell for big bucks. He’s a horse, and this is the carrot he’s after. We definitely don’t want to go it alone against Damen Winter. And Angus may be petty, but he’s also pretty badass from what I can tell, and he’s heard of Damen and the kind of magic he can do. I know it’s not a lot to go on, but . . . are you in?”

  “Markus hasn’t taken back that command he gave me last night, you know. It’s still right here.” He tapped his forehead. “As soon as I regain my strength, all bets are off.”