He slashed Malek’s wrist, and it gaped wide. Degray kicked the chair and it toppled with Malek still bound to it, emptying him onto the pentagram like a garden hose filling a backyard pool.
Kaz screamed through his gag at the horrific sight, tensing like he’d been electrocuted, the toes of his loafers scrabbling on the gravel. Aphra was ice cold, but her eyes were burning embers. And Beckett, who sat bound at the next point on the pentagram, remained eerily still. His expression glazed over, staring into the middle-distance. He looked resigned.
“Imagine if The Agency knew about this spell?” Degray chuckled as he paced towards his next victim. “If they had any clue this ritual existed? They’d be squeezing people dry by the dozen, emptying us like ketchup packets.”
When the knife was at Beckett’s wrist, his broken eyes met Calista’s. They told a story of betrayal—the pain and confusion of an innocent man sentenced to death just moments before his execution. She screamed that he’d be all right. That Degray would never get away with this. Her comforting lies were swallowed by a freezing gust of wind. A hail of loose gravel pelted her face, forcing her eyes shut.
It happened when she blinked, swift and silent. Degray’s knife sent a stream of crimson down Beckett’s wrist. He toppled the chair.
The circle of candles flared in unison, five narrow fingers reaching towards the infinite darkness. A thunderclap boomed in response. The pentagram was being fed, and it howled for more. Degray gazed skyward and grinned at the swirling clouds.
Calista’s heart jackhammered against her ribcage while Beckett bled out, face blanching, eyes fluttering shut. Don’t panic, she told herself. There has to be a solution. The rooftop was warded, taking Elemental magick off the menu, and the tattoo on her back wasn’t budging; the ink-based sigil was technically Elemental, so that was off limits, too. But Degray was performing a Blood magick ritual, so if that door was wedged open, she could pass through it, too.
She dug the nail of her index finger into her thumb, scraping the skin away in painful chunks. She felt a warm drop roll down her knuckle. She bit down on her lip and scraped some more. Once her finger felt wet enough to act as a brush, she drew a symbol on her handcuffs. It was tiny and rough, but it would have to do. She’d drawn the same symbol on a doorknob once, so in theory, it should fit on a tiny square of metal.
Once she’d finished the zig-zag pattern encased in a triangle, she whispered ‘exedunt’ under her breath, and waited for the magick to commence. It didn’t. Was the binding spell blocking this as well? Maybe she wasn’t loud enough. “Exedunt!” she screamed to the heavens, voice straining, veins dancing in her neck. “Exedunt, exedunt, EXEDUNT!”
“What are you babbling about?” Degray asked, twirling his blood-soaked blade. He strolled leisurely towards Kaz.
“Exedunt!” she repeated. Her fiery eyes were staring through his.
“I told you, shout as much as you like, but it’s not going to do any—”
And before he could finish, her handcuffs hissed.
They snapped loose.
From what I’ve read, forging a mystical weapon back in the day was not so different than training a magickal adept. You enchanted a blade, took a swing, and it either sliced through rock like a knife through butter … or it shattered.
Similarly, combat was the time-tested way to ensure your apprentice had become a legitimate Scrivener; that they’d been hardened, polished, and prepared to react under intense pressure. If they survived that first encounter, they’d likely survive many more. But if they failed—which happened more often than not—you’d start again with a new student.
That’s the cold reality of practicing magick. Throughout history, Scriveners were all but guaranteed action and adventure. They were never guaranteed a long life.
– Passage in The North Valley Grimoire
29. Storm of Fire
DEGRAY RUSHED HER in a dead sprint.
Calista was still wrestling with the ropes that bound her ankles when he made impact. It was a gnarly collision; his shoulder clashed with her jaw, rocking her head back, loosening a molar. They rolled one over the other. The heavier Degray landed on top, and when he raised his knife high, poised to plunge deep into her chest, she flung the remains of her handcuffs into his face.
Glowing metal branded his cheek, sizzling like steak on a grill. He scrambled away, howling wildly.
She leaped to her feet and raced to Beckett. He was on his side, wrists still taped to the arms of his chair, glasses smashed. His face was ashen. She ripped off her jacket and used the sleeve as a tourniquet, stemming the flow of blood from the gash on his wrist.
A groan caught her attention. Degray was soldiering towards Kaz, a knife in one hand, the other clasping his face. Nothing was going to stop his ritual, least of all a burn.
Malek’s guns were gone, likely tossed off the roof, and Calista didn’t have Elemental magick—but a fresh supply of blood was pooling around her knees where Beckett had been drained. It beckoned her like a Siren’s call, melodic and relentless.
She splashed her palms into the blood and scraped her fingertips across her cheeks.
All at once the feeling returned. It was a sensation she’d spent months tamping down, desperately trying to ignore, and it welcomed her back with a friendly embrace … followed by a poisonous kiss. It was a metallic shot of pure liquid hate, hot and dark and acidic. The whites of her eyes eclipsed with red.
Degray’s blade was at Kaz’s wrist when she unleashed. She drew an intricate sigil she’d sketched on notepads a dozen times before, but this time, she didn’t require a canvas. It hung in space like finger-paint on a frameless window.
Screaming instructions in Ancient Sumerian shattered the sigil, blasting it into a thousand shards; the tiny heat-seeking missiles fired in one epic salvo, and the quills plunged into her teacher’s face, neck and chest. He bellowed, and his knife clattered at his feet.
It was impossible to tell which wounds were caused by the shards, and where he’d been burnt—or if the flying sigil itself had simply reverted to liquid once it had done its damage. Degray’s mangled face and shredded clothes were so saturated with blood it looked like he’d gone swimming in it.
It was also impossible to know which enchantments he’d called on. He must have invoked protection spells before Calista arrived, because, somehow, he was still vertical. Degray was visibly injured—eyes glazed, staggering on rubber legs—but he was lucid enough to stoop, hike up his jeans and reach into his boot, where he’d been concealing a pistol. He pulled it out and started firing.
The first bullet zipped past her shoulder, embedding into the rooftop door with a sharp ping that rattled her eardrum. He was swaying, barely able to level his weapon.
She rapidly traced another bloody mid-air sigil, a protection spell that ossified into a shield. Calista held her breath as one bullet after another blasted the barrier, chipping away, until it shattered from the relentless fusillade. Another round came within inches of her forehead, slowed with a circular wave of her hand; it crawled like a mosquito trapped in amber, and dropped to the ground. A follow-up shot clipped her shoulder. She gasped, too shocked to produce a scream. The pain blossomed, hot and vicious, stabbing her nerve endings.
She collapsed.
A repetitive sound echoed into the silence—click, click, click. Degray kept squeezing the trigger long after the bullets had stopped flying.
She tried to stand, but her muscles ached. Painful firecrackers popped behind her eyes.
“You’ve got heart,” Degray said. He coughed wetly into his fist. “Definitely a chip off the old block.”
She wanted to trace a new sigil and stab him with a thousand more blades made of blood—or better yet, a million. But she couldn’t. The fire had left her eyes, the energy sapped from her veins.
Calista rolled to her side, nearly steamrolling a body in the process. It was Malek. This is how I’m going to die, she thought: lying in a pool of blood next to a well-dresse
d British man who was duct taped to a chair. How are they going to find me? What will the news say? Will Uncle Frank survive to see any of this? Will my mother be told I’m gone? Or will she spend her final days rotting in solitary confinement, wondering if her only child had abandoned her, refusing to visit or write?
This is my fault, she thought—a notion that hurt more than her bullet wound. This is why everyone leaves me in the end. If I’d worked harder, if I’d figured this out earlier, or if I’d destroyed that stupid grimoire in the first place, none of this would be happening. Kaz told me to let this go. Frank said it would lead to heartache. My mother told me to live a normal life. They were right. I was stubborn and, as always, too proud to see what was right in front of me.
She was almost face-to-face with Malek. His eyes were shut, lips chapped and white. The binding spell was clearly blocking his healing factor, because the wound on his wrist remained fresh, staining the cuff of his crisp linen shirt. He ate bullets for breakfast; by comparison, this was a paper cut. It should’ve re-sealed the moment it had opened. She trailed her eyes to his other wrist, where his champagne-colored timepiece peeked out from beneath his sleeve. Lightning cracked overhead. The crystal inset in the face winked like a miniature strobe light.
She reached out and tugged at the strap, unclasping the buckle. As she struggled to yank it free, she ventured a quick glance across the pentagram. Degray had apparently forgotten about her, or was saving her for later—either way, he didn’t seem concerned that she was still conscious, fidgeting with Malek’s watch. He was searching the perimeter for his knife, lost in the fray.
Then she locked eyes with Aphra. Her head was down, green eyes blazing through a matted curtain of fiery locks. Each heaving breath flared her nostrils. Calista might’ve been running on fumes, but Aphra was gassed up and primed to stomp the accelerator, burying the needle.
Like a tiny whip, Calista sent the face of Malek’s watch into the rooftop. It shattered with a satisfying crunch. A second lash cracked the stone. The sound wasn’t like glass breaking, though; the broken gem belched, reverberating like an unexpected blast of speaker feedback at full volume.
She managed a weak push-up and peered over Malek’s legs. She’d missed it—the transformation had already taken place. Aphra’s chair was in pieces, scattered across her point of the pentagram.
Whoever Aphra was—whatever she was—had been replaced with tentacles. It wasn’t like an octopus, where a head with eyes and a siphon were at the base. These appendages were loosely tethered to a mass of pure darkness, emerging from a pulsing black hole that hovered with no apparent method of propulsion. She would’ve screamed in horror if she’d had the strength.
Spotting the threat, Degray tore off his jacket and ripped up his shirt, exposing the cluster of runes that decorated his torso. He shouted something that sounded Germanic, and the ink turned to molten gold. For a moment Calista thought he’d botched whatever spell he was attempting, and that a bright metallic flame was eating him from the inside out. No such luck. He scraped at his sigil, clawing into his ribcage, and came away with a sword. The part of his tattoo that resembled a hilt disappeared from the design.
Degray’s scimitar was a nasty curved blade forged of pure light, popping with microbursts that forced him to clutch it with a two-handed grip. It seemed like the weapon was trying to fly away of its own accord, and he strained to keep it under control.
The swarm of tentacles darted, attacking from every angle. Degray’s blade met them with looping slashes. The sparring match was a blur: light versus darkness, streams of sticky black fluid spurting from the tentacles as Degray lopped them off, sometimes two at a time. The appendages re-grew like Hydras—for every severed limb, two sprouted in its place.
It was difficult to tell who was winning. From where Calista was crouched it looked like a stalemate—Degray wasn’t being touched by the tentacles, and Aphra continued the assault despite the damage she was sustaining. After an elegant spinning move that hacked three limbs off with a backhanded slash, the quivering mass seemed to relent. Perhaps sensing the momentum shift, Degray threw his scimitar end over end, and it disappeared into the black hole with a watery plop as if he’d tossed it into a lake. Aphra shuddered. Some of the severed stumps where the tentacles had been chopped off continued to vomit toxic goo. They were no longer regenerating.
Degray staggered and dropped to his knees by the discarded grimoire. He rapidly paged through the volume. Twisting his hand into a claw above the text, he muttered something that Calista couldn’t hear; the wind was howling, and the tentacles were screeching out a horrible sound, like a litter of kittens crushed under a boot.
The grimoire shook and text streamed from the page, one long sentence after another, coalescing into an icy blue sphere the size of a softball that hovered a few inches from Degray’s palm. He stood, reeled back, and pitched it at Aphra. It exploded like a snowball striking a brick wall, and the black tentacles frosted over. For a moment it looked like a decorative water fountain that had frozen solid, right before the valve could be properly shut off for the winter. Degray lunged forward and punched it, a stiff uppercut to the base where the appendages met. There was a shattering sound, followed by a second frosty burst, and the tentacles disappeared. Aphra was laid out flat, bleeding from her nostrils. The remains of her dress clung to her pale body in ribbons that flapped in the wind.
A dull ache pierced Calista’s chest. She had nothing left to give. Shattering the watch and freeing Aphra was her last shot—her ‘Hail Mary pass’ as Jackson would’ve said. She was drained, Aphra was spent, and Malek was teetering on the brink of death.
They’d lost.
And Degray had won.
I wish I could end this, she thought. Right now, in a storm of fire. It was a vengeful, venomous notion, burrowing deep in her mind like a worm through a rotten apple, lancing the core. She reached for her back pocket.
Lying on her side, wheezing painfully, she unfolded the spell with one hand and flattened it on the gravel. There was no way she was going to let Degray win. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to lay helplessly in a pool of blood, watching him carve into Kaz like he’d done to Malek and Beckett, draining him for this depraved ritual.
That’s where Degray was: stalking back towards Kaz, exhausted, clinging to consciousness, using every ounce of remaining strength to lift his hunting knife into position. He’d dismissed Calista, or assumed she was on the brink of death—or maybe he needed her alive to drain into the fifth point of the pentagram.
She closed her eyes, and for a flash she pictured herself summoning Moretti’s Golem—becoming something cold and indestructible, skin of molten rock, fists like boulders. She’d grab hold of Degray with both hands and twist in opposite directions, wrenching him like a wet towel until his insides spilled out. Or she’d pound him like a sledgehammer until he was a quivering mass of broken bones and tenderized flesh, unrecognizable when the police showed up to ID his body.
After the summoning wore off she’d stiffen, joints locked, eyesight fading as her corneas mineralized. Her core would cool fast in the winter air. And then, once the transformation was complete, she’d crack—slowly at first—a hairline fracture running down her chest, through her navel, splitting her in two; painless, but inevitable. Piece by piece she’d crumble, limbs breaking into smaller and smaller fragments until only dust remained. The wind would carry her remains into the night, and she’d be gone. But everyone would be safe.
She blinked away tears. Losing a loved one is a wound that never quite heals; more than a year later, her mother’s absence was an exposed nerve, blistering at the slightest breeze, and Jackson’s death was a void that would never be filled. Her eyes met Kaz, and she pictured her life without him … and then, the pain he’d feel if she were taken from him. That’s what this spell would leave her friends and family with: loss.
She was going to do more than save everyone on this rooftop. She was going to save herself, too.
Degray caught a glimpse of Calista trying to regain her footing. “You’ve got gumption, kiddo. I’m gonna miss you.” He smiled wide, incisors stained red like a shark in a feeding frenzy. “But what are you doing over there?”
She held the origami star in place, anchored on her knee, and without looking up she answered him. “I’m improvising.”
A quick scribble of bloody fingerpaint and a flick of her wrist sent the star twirling across the rooftop, riding an icy current. Degray never saw it coming. As it made contact with his chest, Calista screamed “Ignis!” so loud she thought her vocal cords would snap.
The sigil on the star obeyed her command, first igniting into a brilliant blue flame, then expanding, engulfing her history teacher in a cocoon of fiery tendrils that took hold like a giant’s fist. His screaming was unbearable. His voice kept increasing in pitch the more he burned, growing ever more hysterical. Heat rolled off him in waves, warping the air. Degray tore at his clothes and flung them away, but it was useless. He was on fire, not his garments. Skin, hair, muscle, bone, all being eaten by fingers of hellfire that flared and intensified the more he struggled.
Staggering to the precipice of the rooftop, he tripped over the edge and toppled out of view. A trail of crackling flame followed him down, and a thud rose from the steps below.
The screaming stopped.
Calista wiped her hands on her jeans and scooped up her grimoire. Scrambling through the text, she found the spell she was looking for. With a few words and a twisting hand gesture, a sharp purple light heated the rooftop, like stepping from an air-conditioned car into the searing midday sun. The ward evaporated.
She glanced up to see Malek free of his bindings. The hole in his wrist was stitching itself closed, and he seemed more upset with the state of his tattered suit, bloodied and slashed beyond repair.
The North Valley Grimoire Page 31