“Leandras,” Jessica snarled, “don’t let your guard down now.”
Fuck, she hoped that was enough.
The Umbál chuckled. “You’ve obviously had your favor revoked, Vem-da’án. And now I see why. This witch is clearly too much for you.”
Whether or not Leandras was ready for the grand finale, she had to do it now.
Jessica spat a glob of blood into the dirt and looked up to meet the Umbál’s gaze, his eyes blazing with the green light of everything wrong in this world. Then she grinned. “Thank you.”
“It was not—”
She didn’t give him time to answer but threw her hands out toward the half-dozen magicals circling in front of her. The tendrils of black smoke launching from her palms whipped once through the air and straightened into glistening, piercing shards of her darkest magic she’d needed the goddamn Laen’aroth to help her retrieve.
The black spears sliced through each magical looming over her, filling the air with sharp cries and horrified gasps and sputtered choking. Her power cut through any piece of them she could reach, but instead of turning her own force outward to let the chaos consume her victims, she drew it all into her instead.
Charging the battery.
Siphoning up every bit of magic and life they had in them just as she’d stripped it from Mickey with the spell that reversed the Shattering and directed every nauseating fiber of his being into her tin box of magic waiting to be used again.
Shouts rang out from the rest of the ambushing party when they realized it wasn’t the Guardian being tortured but the other way around.
She barely heard a thing.
Jessica was completely consumed by her magic now, grinning like a lunatic as her six victims pumped her full of their own life force and had no way to escape what was being done to them.
The bodies stopped struggling seconds before she’d drained them dry.
From the corner of her eye, she saw a wall of violet and silver light bloom up in the general vicinity of where Leandras had been trapped to the earth of his homeworld. But she couldn’t look away from the hideous glory of what was coming.
The rest of the horde screamed and snarled in protest, surging toward her and launching their own attacks, but nothing could stop her now.
Black whisps of smoke burst across her flesh, her entire body felt like it was on fire, and somewhere in the back of her mind, she briefly drew the connection between this feeling here and the time she’d spent with Leandras in that tent.
If she wasn’t getting busy with a fae man, at least she still had this.
Jessica still had who and what she was.
Honestly, it felt even better.
The drained husks of the six attackers who’d given their lives to fuel her next desperate assault dropped when she finally withdrew those piercing skewers of her magic. So much power wrapped up in one tiny witchy package. The urge to let it out was stronger than any longing, any pain, any pleasure she’d ever known.
She let her magic do what it wanted and screamed.
The first shuddering blast of black light exploding out of her pulsed across the battleground and stopped the closest magicals in their tracks. Hands and legs and heads ripped away from their rightful places and scattered through the air. The second blast of her power caught everything in a wave of consuming chaos and shattered what remained of her enemies before they’d even fallen back to the ground. The third rippled across the ruins of Cálindor and made the wreckage groan and rumble beneath the force. More boulders toppled, dust and small chunks of stone shivered down to the barren earth, and another flash of silver raced up the stone stairway.
Then it was over.
Jessica dropped forward, barely managing to keep her face out of the dirt when she caught herself with outstretched hands.
The Gateway’s green light pulsed with nauseating strength, and the blinding flash of light in the sky brought a roar of deafening thunder almost immediately.
Honestly, that thunder sounded a lot more like the bellowing of a million voices crying out in fury.
With a gasp, Jessica snatched up the sack of artifacts and raced toward Leandras just as the shielded wall of light he’d erected flickered out.
The fae man lay in a crumpled heap, the green tendrils no longer holding him in place. But his body rippled with silver and violet light, and his skin looked very much like the rotting dome of the Umur’udal’s magic crumbling away around the Laenmúr forest.
Shit. She’d hurt him.
She knew she would, but at least he was still in one semi-functioning piece.
When she dropped to her knees in the dirt beside him, he groaned and tried to wave her away.
Good, at least he was still alive too.
“We have to go.”
“I won’t...” Whatever he said after that was mumbled and completely intelligible. He did, however, cry out when she grabbed his arm and slung it over her shoulders.
That was definitely blood and maybe even melted flesh beneath her hand, but they’d have time to deal with that on the other side of the Gateway.
“Come on. Get up.”
“Jessica...”
“I’m not leaving you here. Get up!”
What kind of message would that send the Dalu’Rázj? That the vestrohím Guardian had just demolished his entire ambush but left the fae man alive just for fun? Most likely in excruciating agony but still alive.
If Leandras tried to help her, it wasn’t much help at all. Gritting her teeth, she dragged the fae’s stumbling weight after her toward the staircase.
Christ, climbing those things would be impossible.
He seemed to realize this once she lugged him up the first step and the sky splintered with green light again. The stairs trembled beneath them, and Jessica had to wrap her arms around Leandra’s torso just to keep him from falling off.
More windows of green light lined in flickering black blinked into existence all around them again.
Reinforcements, then. And now they were sitting ducks on an open staircase to a fucking door floating in the air.
Leandras roared at the effort of finally getting his legs to work, and he pushed himself clumsily up the stairs.
They were almost there. Just one more good push, and she’d get her hand around that door knob before...what?
Before they were blasted back again? There’d be no coming back from that one; the glowing green portals overwhelmed the ruins now not by a few dozen but by hundreds. And they were all melting together to form one giant rift in the air big enough to bring an entire army through.
Jesus, she wished she’d had a better plan.
As she reached out for the knob, the words tumbled out of her in a breathless whisper. “Please just fucking open.”
A flash of electric blue rippled around the outline of the door, then Jessica’s fingers brushed against the brass. She didn’t even have a chance to grab it and turn; the door flew open all on its own, blinding her with the brilliant white light of the Gateway portal not across one world but between two.
However it happened, it was open.
Jessica kicked herself off the final step and clutched a slippery, half-dead Leandras in her arms before pulling him through with her.
The world turned upside down.
The stormy sky exploded with a furious scream and a darkness swarming down from that green rip through the clouds.
Jessica’s breath escaped her completely, and the feeling of Leandras in her arms disappeared along with every other sensation as they tumbled through the Gateway.
The first thing Jessica felt when the sensation returned to her body like a bad dream was the floor beneath her cheek and the stickiness in her hands.
She couldn’t open her eyes.
“What do you mean upstairs? No, I have no clue— Oh, come on. That isn’t even my job!”
Whose voice was that?
She was sure she recognized it, but expending as much magic as she had quickly foll
owed by a desperate dive through a portal had scrambled her brains.
“Okay, fine,” the voice continued. “I’ll humor you. You know nothing you say ever makes any sense, right? Yeah. I’m sure she did.”
Footsteps pounded up the stairs.
The stairs to the second floor of the bank. She was back!
“Stop yelling at me! Jeeze, how much worse can this day—Holy shit.” Something thumped against the wall, followed by hurried footsteps and another loud thump right by her head. Then there were hands on her—warm hands grabbing her shoulders and flipping her over onto her back. “Jessica?”
She gasped in a ragged breath and coughed violently, her eyelids fluttering.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. I see them! Jessica? Can you hear—No. I am not doing that. Jessica?”
A groan escaped her, then the shaking started.
“No, no. Come on. You have to wake up so I can—What? Fine. Fine. Just shut up.”
Her eyes finally opened to see Ben Cready’s bright blue eyes staring down at her in panic. That was quickly followed by the sting of his sharp slap across her cheek. It wasn’t hard enough to actually hurt her, but it was the jolt she needed to come out of her portal-jumping stupor.
With another ragged, desperate gasp, she sat bolt upright and shoved Ben away. He fell back on his ass and gaped at her as she scrambled on all fours toward Leandras.
“Don’t—don’t say I told you so,” Ben muttered. “What about him? He what?”
It sounded like Ben and the bank were getting along just fine. At least from this end of the one-sided conversation, but Jessica didn’t have time to think much more about it.
Leandras’ breath came in ragged gasps through his open mouth, his chest heaving and fighting for air. The fae was a mess. Yes, that had been his blood she’d felt drying like glue on her hands, which still seeped through what looked like tiny pinpricks coating every inch of his flesh.
Flesh that had partially blackened and was starting to peel away, because his shield hadn’t been anywhere near strong enough to fully protect him from her power. She’d obliterated everything, and if she’d obliterated him too...
Honestly, she had no idea what she’d do with herself if she lost him. Again.
Ben groaned and thumped his back against the wall. “That’s the worst thing you could possibly say right now—”
“Shut up!” Jessica snapped. “Both of you.”
“Sorry.”
She scanned the damage literally everywhere on Leandras’ body and fought back both the tears threatening to blind her and the insane urge to run right down those stairs and out onto the street.
What had she done? What could she do?
The same thing she’d done already. Maybe.
He’d been so sure she could do it again. Railen had told her she wouldn’t have to know how, just that she could.
Damnit, that wasn’t how magic worked.
Jessica pressed her hands gently against Leandras’ bare chest, and he croaked something in protest, his eyelids fluttering. She focused every inch of her on finding the cause within him, searching for what shouldn’t have been there.
Where was it?
She had to find it, because it was killing him.
“W-what happened to him?” Ben muttered.
“Jesus, where’s that damn lizard when you need him?”
“Oh. He’s, uh...downstairs, I think—”
“I said be quiet!” Jessica snarled. Her hands trembled against Leandras’ chest. The fae man seemed on the verge of becoming rather conscious, which would make this even harder if he started thrashing beneath the pain bringing him back from oblivion.
She’d done it. She’d killed the Laen’aroth, and it wasn’t because she hadn’t given him enough warning or that he hadn’t been smart enough to prepare for it.
Jessica’s magic was just that much stronger than his. At least when it was fueled by six dead magicals serving the bastard responsible for this whole mess in the first place—
She froze.
“My magic.”
“I-is that a rhetorical question, or...”
Ignoring Ben’s useless side chatter, Jessica closed her eyes and focused on the feeling of Leandras’ skin—however grossly slick with blood—and looked for herself within the fae man’s dying body.
Her magic was inside him. It had to be, if he’d survived and was now bleeding out through a million holes in his flesh.
The violent surge of her power raced down her arms and into her fingertips, and she searched for those pieces of herself just like she’d searched for them in her vestrohím-powering victims. She felt his life flickering there inside his body, raging against the darkness trying to snuff it out.
Gritting her teeth, Jessica called her own magic to her and hoped to every deity in existence she didn’t draw his out too.
“Whoa.” Ben shifted where he sat against the wall to get a better view. “Are you doing that?”
Jessica opened her eyes to see her hands glowing with black light. Tiny, hair-thin threads of black smoke rose from the holes in Leandras’ body, flickering in the air before trailing toward Jessica. Each curl of smoke felt like a literal pinprick as it stabbed into her, and she doubled down on the effort, ignoring the dozens and then hundreds of tiny stings lighting her skin on fire.
It was working.
The curling flakes of burnt skin covering Leandras’ flesh faded back into their smooth, healthy state.
“Jessica, hold on. Whoa, whoa.” Ben started to crawl toward her, but she snarled at him and shot him a warning glare.
“Back off.”
His eyes widened, but he didn’t move.
She had to look like the craziest idiot of them all right now, but she couldn’t stop until it was finished.
She couldn’t stop.
The last thread of her own magic slithered from a rapidly closing hole in the fae man’s neck and struck her in the same place instead.
Then all the strength went out of her, and she didn’t so much collapse as sag pitifully away from him.
It was so hard to breathe.
“Shit. What did you do?” Ben whined. “No, I have no idea what she is. What does that have to do with any—”
Jessica’s ears stopped working. Ben’s muttering to the bank in his head and her own desperate gulps for air faded away. Her head hit the floor again, and she barely managed to slide one hand toward her face to see it studded with tiny holes, bleeding freely, the skin blackened and peeling away.
Well, shit. So this was what her own magic did when she turned it on herself, huh?
Her eyelids fluttered closed, but not before she saw a completely healed Leandras turn his head to look at her. His eyes flashed silver, he lurched toward her, then the last of her consciousness to which she desperately tried to cling faded away.
At least he wasn’t dead.
She might be soon, though.
Chapter 18
“Well you can tell that immense aggravation of a voice inside your head that I did not do this.”
“What else are we supposed to think, huh? The only thing I know is that I came upstairs, and the two of you are lying on the floor like you just fell through the ceiling. Jessica had that weird bag of stuff in her hand, you were lying there looking like someone just blew you up, then she jumped on top of you and you switched places! So how should I—Oh. Yeah, I guess there’s that too.”
“I beg your pardon?”
That was Leandras. Jessica recognized the voice, especially now that he’d stopped yelling and sounded completely flummoxed by Ben’s recent account, however lacking in detail.
Okay, so the fae man hadn’t died. Points for the Guardian.
But why couldn’t Jessica open her eyes?
“Nothing,” Ben muttered. “Just WD reminding me that he was the first one who knew you were here.”
Leandras snorted. “Have you been housing guests in this establishment while it’s been in your care?”
“What? No. WD. Winthrop & Dirledge. Look, I had to call him something, and the real name’s way too long.”
Jessica groaned, her dry, cracked lips peeling painfully apart when she opened her mouth. “Jesus Christ, don’t give it a name. You’ll just get all attached, and that’ll make it even worse for you when you hand me that necklace.”
“Jessica.” Leandras’ footsteps—she could only assume it was Leandras; Ben wasn’t nearly brave or stupid enough to try approaching her first while the fae stood guard—headed toward her. His hands settled lightly on her shoulders, vanished again, then reappeared at her face and smoothed the hair away from her forehead. “It worked. You did it. I... Jessica? If you insist on not looking at me, you could at the very least ask me to leave.”
She tried to force her eyes open, but they had no intention of moving on their own. “I’m working on it.”
“You want me to go?”
“No, I mean my eyes.” Pushing herself up to sit against the wall, she worked at prying her eyelids apart and found them crusted over with blood and something she didn’t even want to try figuring out. Then she blinked furiously and could hardly see through all the crap stuck around her lashes. “Give me a second.”
“Careful.” He tried to help her stand, but she brushed his hands away. “We’ll go with the recap later. Two minutes.”
She staggered against the wall and slid her hand along it to guide her into her bedroom. The door was open, making it easy enough to shuffle all the way to the bathroom, where she splashed cold water on her face over and over again until she could see clearly and the debris from her inherited wounds was completely gone. Then she tied her hair up, didn’t bother to look at her reflection, and headed toward the door.
Leandras’ head poked around the corner of the doorway, and he raised his eyebrows. “Jessica, we need to—”
“Not done yet.” Jessica shut the door in his face, felt momentarily sorry about it, then smirked anyway.
The Spellcast Gate (Accessory to Magic Book 5) Page 18