by Robin Hale
Oh god. Oh god.
“At the end, even Olivia proved too ungrateful,” Absalon spat. “But you, Mary? I’ve solved it.”
He turned to face me, a thick coil of silk rope in his hands, dripping with something he’d applied while his back was turned. The rope was rigged through a piece of metalwork I couldn’t quite recognize, except — oh god. The sleeping charm. The charm I’d hung above my bed, it — it was the same metal, the same pale lavender shimmer of magic around it.
It hadn’t been from Rhea at all. Horror was a spike through my gut.
I’d been sleeping beneath it for weeks.
“Recognize it, do you?” Absalon asked brightly. “I’ll admit a certain fondness for them. So many star-born worry about destructive power — but why batter down thick defenses when you can simply unlock the door through sleep?”
I bolted.
My fingers wrapped around the deadbolt and turned it, reached for the doorknob and found — a keyhole on the inside. Oh god. In the space of a heartbeat, Absalon was at my back, the slimy weight of his aura pressing against my own and I acted on instinct.
Power flared, hot and golden and burning through every one of my pores, and Absalon was flung back against the far wall of the entry.
“Ward magic, pet? Clever.” Absalon’s voice dripped with a sick sort of pride. It sounded like fondness for a favored child who’d done something amusing. “But there’s no use resisting.”
“Rhea is my soul mate,” I blurted with my back against the door, hands outstretched while I prayed I could call that ward around me again at will.
“Mm, that might be true. But as I’ve said, I’ve solved it.” Absalon lifted the black rope, painted in an oil slick of magic and darkness. “I can bind our souls together — and once I have, I will accept your apology for your behavior.”
My feet were carrying me through the front sitting room into a formal dining room and out the other side before I’d made the conscious decision to flee.
“There’s no use running, Mary!” Absalon called delightedly.
In a blur of black and gray and crimson Absalon was once again at my side. My hands left the window I’d been straining to open and I picked up a heavy piece of carved stone from the sideboard. The vampire’s mouth twitched in amusement when I hefted the thing higher into my arms but his eyes went wide once my objective became clear. His body was a blur moving toward mine and my power flared again — it tasted like seaside air on a clear day, like the scorching Midwestern summer sun tearing through sunscreen — and I hurled the stone through the sealed window’s glass panes.
Absalon struck the far wall, feet sliding over the floor, the tasteful carpet running through. The glass shattered. Time slowed. I watched each glittering shard dance through the air and fall to the thick grass outside. Pieces clung to the frame like fangs in the window but it didn’t matter — I had to try.
I had to try.
I flung my body forward, trying to follow the stone through the window when hands wrapped around my shoulders and tossed me easily across the room. There was the smell of hot sidewalks and chlorinated pools, then Absalon hissing in pain. My head cracked against the open doorway to the hall with a sickening thud and the world went gray, swirling around me in pitching waves and taunting swipes.
I collapsed to the floor and I fought, I fought to get up. My arms didn’t work. My legs couldn’t remember how to stand and the sound of that rope with its will-enslaving magic rang in my skull as fiercely as the impact had. My fingers flexed, hands convulsed, and I tried to find the place inside me where that ward had come from. Slowly, weakly, it filled the air around me.
“See what an awful thing you made me do, Mary? If you would cooperate, this would all be so simple.” Absalon sounded genuinely regretful and I added another aspect to my understanding of evil.
He came forward, pressing against the soft edges of the warding magic I held around me, and snorted. “That’s lovely, my dear, but you’ll run out of power before I run out of time.”
The sound of splintering wood split the air.
22
Rhea
I took the last turn into Absalon’s affluent neighborhood with a lump in my throat, pulse so quick it was practically humming in every soft part of my body. At the sight of Laurel’s car parked along the street — the only one I could see, and wasn’t that the sign of a richer-than-you neighborhood? That no one needed to park in the elements? — the lump in my throat plummeted into my gut.
I’d been right. She was there.
Electricity sparked along my skin and the subtle puff of smoke from the truck’s radio told me I’d already lost control. Of myself, of my magic, of the world around me. I was in over my head but there was still only one thing that mattered: getting to Laurel and confessing how I felt. Keeping her safe from Absalon ranked up there with breathing, but I knew that I had to be honest with her.
I threw the truck into park and set the brake in one fluid motion before flinging myself from the cab to sprint across the thick, lush grass of the front lawn. I didn’t care if I got in there and found Absalon serving tea, or Laurel happily chatting with him about some obscure magical subject. I didn’t care if I looked like an idiot. Every part of me — from the aching place in the center of my magic that longed for Laurel’s closeness to the churning in my gut that had plagued me for weeks — refused to spend an instant longer than I had to out of Laurel’s company. If she sent me away, I would go. But I wouldn’t give up before she had.
I skidded to a halt on the front step, fist poised above the door when I heard the sound.
Glass. Shattering glass followed by the sort of thud that could only be made by a human body.
I had the multitool out of my pocket and jammed between the door and its frame before the thought was fully formed in my head. Lightning arced, split, crackled around the metal pieces of the door, the knob and the locking mechanisms, and before I knew it the multitool had directed an explosive force that sent the door splintering through the night air. I was inside the house in the next heartbeat — and it was almost my last heartbeat when I made sense of the scene in front of me.
Laurel was slumped in a pile in the hallway, hands spread defensively in front of her. She was surrounded by chaos. Broken glass, smears of blood — there was a shimmer of magic in the air, some sort of protective ward that was holding but only barely. Her forehead was split open, bruising already lifting on her cheekbones, her eye socket. Blood dripped from her hairline to her jaw, trembling on the bone before it splashed to the floor.
Absalon stood over her, his normally-perfect hair in disarray, collar askew, pushing against that slight warp to the air to force his way through.
My vision went red.
I was down the hall before I could blink, air currents carrying me forward as much as my feet did. My lungs ached, strained, screamed with the pressure of the adrenaline coursing through my veins and I drove my fist forward with the full force of my momentum —
Only to watch as Absalon blurred into motion, easily avoiding the punch and catching my wrist in one smooth movement. With a brief tug I was spun, feet lifting off the ground, all momentum, all leverage utterly lost as his forearm pressed down on my throat in a dark promise of the end of all things. The movement pulled my back against his chest.
“Honestly, Ms. Barnes, I know you lost your mother at a rather formative age, but surely she taught you that it was rude to interrupt.” The rank, tepid breath of his words flooded across my ear in spittle-flecked waves. His fingertips dug into my shoulder, his other hand — his free hand, and how humiliating that he only needed the one to restrain me — tracing a condescending line down the side of my cheek. The sheer gap between us, the difference in our relative strengths…I’d never felt it more keenly than that moment.
Was this how my mother had felt in the end? Was this what my grandmother saw before Zora took her life?
The questions froze the blood in my veins.
&nbs
p; “Let her go, Absalon.” Laurel’s voice shook but her eyes were fierce and I watched her claw her way up the wall to rise to her feet. “Your problem is with me.”
Fierce affection bloomed in my chest and fought with the cold resignation that Absalon’s bones pressed into my skin.
“Mm, I think we might have slightly different views on the situation, my pet,” Absalon laughed. “But I will make you a deal. Allow the bonding and I will send your little friend home unharmed. Defy me and, well.” I could feel every huff of Absalon’s dark chuckle against the exposed skin of my neck. “I’m afraid that Barleywick falls at last.”
Laurel’s eyes went wide. Her pupils contracted down to pinpricks, filling her features with horror and the soothing shade of that perfect hazel iris. That kind of discord was grotesque. The color drained from her face and brought the deep red of her blood on her skin into stark relief.
I watched the disgust, the fear, the grief mix and roil on Laurel’s face — and saw the precise moment she came to the wrong decision. The muscle in her jaw twitched and her eyes took on a look of resigned determination before her lips parted.
I couldn’t let her do it. Regardless of anything else, regardless of my own fears, my own hangups — I didn’t know how he thought he could do it, but the bastard clearly believed that he could.
Power thrummed through my veins, pushed at the inside of my skin, the surface of my bones. I could taste lightning on my tongue, smell the potential in the air.
“Don’t do it, Laurel,” I bit out past the clench of my jaw. “It’s not — it isn’t worth it.” I willed her to meet my eyes and once she had — once those incredible eyes were locked on my gaze — I tried to put everything on my face that I hadn’t found the words to say. That I hadn’t found the courage to say.
“That’s sweet,” Absalon sneered and jerked his forearm tighter against my throat.
An involuntary yelp slipped from my lips and I winced at the way Laurel’s eyes went wider. I shook my head and met her desperate stare once more. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Then I let go.
It was like pulling the pin on a grenade. There was a moment, a brief half-second where the only person who knew what was about to happen was me. Then the penny dropped.
Laurel’s hands flew up and the air shimmered as her warding magic appeared around her again.
Everything went white. Power poured through my skin, arced along my fingers, my arms, shot from my eyes and filled every inch of the air in that house in the span of a heartbeat.
Absalon’s scream was secondary to the rush of my power. The rush was the fulfillment of expectation, every fever dream and desperate wish coming true in a sudden spike of ecstatic bliss. It’d been too long — far, far too long since I’d tasted my real power. And I let every bit of it flow through me and into the atmosphere.
I could smell Absalon’s flesh, knew the exact moment his screams had stopped. The arm around my throat went lax and his body thudded, still twitching and jerking beneath the onslaught of electric current, to the floor.
And still I burned.
The controls I’d carefully held for more than a decade were all beyond my grasp. The valves were thrown open, every lock or restriction shattered beneath the full force of the magic I’d let loose. And there was no hope I could close it again.
Through the chaos, through the storm I’d called in the middle of a formal dining room in a snobby neighborhood in a Midwestern city, I saw Laurel. She’d fallen to her knees, hands still outstretched as she maintained her ward and I was glad to see her — glad that the last thing that I would ever see was Laurel in touch with her magic, even if it was with fear in her eyes.
I wished I could have told her how I felt. Wished that I could have controlled the movement of my tongue, the air in my lungs well enough to speak in those last few moments.
My magic burned through every inch of my body. My flesh didn’t sizzle. I didn’t blacken and split the way Absalon would have, the way I had before — this time was different. Instead, I burned not flesh but power. And when it was gone? When it was gone I knew that I would go to meet my coven again.
‘Rhea.’
Laurel’s voice. It was Laurel’s voice. Her mouth didn’t move, she didn’t scream the words above the whirling vortex that threw the house around us into chaos — lamps, vases, obscure and irritating knickknacks, all of them were caught in a cyclone centered on my body, crashing into walls and each other, seeding the winds with the shards of Absalon’s opulent lifestyle — but I heard her all the same.
Her voice was in my head.
‘Rhea, he’s gone. You did it! I need you to stop, Rhea.’
Laurel locked eyes with me, staring intently and breathing hard. From the corner of my eye, I saw a dagger of broken glass careen into her ward, deflect from it and penetrate deep into the plaster wall behind her. I wanted to flinch, felt the impulses go through my body, but I was still rigid in the center of the storm.
‘Please,’ she pled. Her voice wavered, cracked even in my head and I saw the edges of her ward begin to fade.
She needed to go. She had to leave. I didn’t know how to respond. I’d never had a gift for telepathy, couldn’t understand how magic could work that way — but at that moment? I tried to figure it the fuck out.
‘Get out. Get out before your ward breaks — it’s too late for me, don’t make me your murderer.’ I repeated the thoughts over and over again in my head.
‘I can hear you, Rhea,’ Laurel’s voice whispered in my mind. ‘I can hear you. It’s the bond. But no. I’m not going to let you die for me — you have to stop.’
I didn’t know how.
I reached for my magic but it was a wild thing, untamable and evading my grasp in tumbling rapids.
‘I can’t.’ I hoped Laurel could tell how sorry I was.
‘You can.’ Her voice in my head was iron and there was a burst of something sweet and hot and golden in the center of my chest. ‘Hold onto me.’
The golden thing burned brighter — hot, but not scorching. It was basking in a sunbeam after a week of rainy days. It flowed through my body like warm honey, bathing my rigid, aching limbs in its sweet, golden glow.
I sucked in a sharp breath, filling my lungs and shocking myself with the sound of it. Had I not been breathing? I couldn’t tell. But that breath was a breakthrough. My magic began to calm. It was drawn to the golden place inside me, pulling back from the air, back from the objects hurled around the room. Back from the surface of my skin. It burrowed its way back inside and coiled around the place that Laurel’s magic touched my soul.
The winds died down, the electricity stopped crackling, stopped arcing and I could finally move my limbs.
It was over. The storm had passed.
“Laurel,” I gasped and fell to my knees.
The ward dispersed and Laurel lunged forward, arms wrapping around my chest and tugging me hard against the softness of her body.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Laurel whispered in heaving sobs against my neck. “You saved me.” She pulled back, tangled her fingers in my hair, and looked deep into my eyes. “You’re an angel, Rhea.”
And then she kissed me.
She tasted like blood and ozone, or maybe that was me, but I couldn’t begin to care. She was alive. She was alive and whole and Absalon would never be able to touch her again. My hands came back to life and I clutched at her back, feeling whole civilizations hinge on the rise and fall of her breath, stolen in moments between the slide of our lips and the innocent explorations of our tongues.
She was safe.
At least until the Council got there. The thought brought me up short, sent my blood pumping cold through my shaking limbs.
“We have to get out of here,” I said, jerking back away from Laurel’s intoxicating warmth. “We can’t be here.” I shifted on my knees and turned back to look where — Oh, fuck. Absalon was beyond recognition. His skin was blackened and split, red and raw w
here it wasn’t white from the bone showing through. His clothing was char, fused to parts of his body, crumbled and destroyed where it had covered the arm that had been around my neck.
It looked brutal.
He’d deserved worse.
But with the level of magical fire show I’d given off, there was no way we weren’t about to be covered in Council marshals.
“The Council — Absalon was their pet. We have to go —” I tried to pull Laurel to her feet, tried to scramble to my own, but my limbs refused to cooperate.
“You go,” Laurel said.
I blinked at her. “No, you don’t understand — the Council —”
“The Council hasn’t had any trouble with me, and I’m not going to let them punish you for rescuing me from that bastard.” Laurel’s eyes were fierce, her jaw set. “Go, Rhea. They’ll be here soon.”
“I —” The words died in my throat, useless beneath the force of Laurel’s determination.
“I mean it! Get out of here.” Laurel pushed me toward the door, pleading more eloquently with her eyes than I’d ever heard anyone speak.
I stumbled backward. The once-familiar rush of air pushed against my legs to hold me up, an old friend I’d locked away for years. She was right. I couldn’t be there. I couldn’t —
I darted on windswept strides toward the blown-open door, toward my truck, desperate to outrun the specter of Council marshals haunting my steps.
23
Laurel
If Absalon’s lair had been surprisingly suburban, the Council’s seat of power was downright modern. It was situated downtown, next to national headquarters for grocery companies and manufacturing giants, the same as any other bureaucratic body. I’d never had a corporate job, but I sincerely hoped that most board meetings weren’t quite so nerve-wracking.