Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus Identity

by Lydia Sherrer

  “I don’t know if I have enough rope to reach the bottom. I only had room for twenty meters, and that drop is probably closer to twenty-five. But it looks like the slope starts to even out about halfway down. We should be able to free climb the rest of the way if we need to.”

  “Yeah, and cause an avalanche to crush us all,” Sebastian said, glaring over his shoulder at the drop off.

  “There wasn’t room for climbing harnesses either, so we’ll have to rappel with just the rope. Have you ever used the South African Method before?”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. Learned that right after I mastered the Lithuanian and East Hong Kong Methods, obviously.”

  Mallory’s response, complete with blinding headlamp to his eyes, made it pretty clear she didn’t appreciate his sarcasm. But he preferred being distracted by her Death Stare of Eternal Doom over totally freaking out—of course he’d never used the South African Method, whatever that might be. Who did she think he was, Indiana Jones?—and so he stuck his tongue out and prepared himself to be tossed over the drop off. At least he’d get to the bottom faster that way.

  To his complete astonishment, instead of throwing him off a cliff, Mallory chuckled.

  “You are a strange, strange man, Sebastian Blackwell. It’s refreshing—when it’s not completely and totally irritating. One of these days you’re going to stick that tongue out at the wrong person, though, and it’s going to get you killed.”

  Sebastian grinned. “Well I’ll be. Miss Grumpy McGrumperstein has a sense of humor after all.”

  “What did you just call me?”

  “Errr”—maybe he was going to get thrown off a cliff after all—“nothing. Let’s just agree that today is not the day for my impudent tongue to spell my doom, and you carry on with showing me the whatever-it-is method, okay?”

  She did, though he felt she was a bit more rough than was strictly necessary. The method turned out to be a climber’s technique of wrapping a rope around oneself in order to free rappel. Once she was satisfied he wouldn’t fall and break his neck, she got in position herself and began the descent, going first so Sebastian could see how it was done. Also because it would be easier for him to pull her up if a disaster happened than the other way around.

  By the time Mallory reached the end of the rope, Sebastian found himself almost wishing it was a sheer rock face they had to climb down, not this massive slope of rubble. Every step Mallory took dislodged something new, and Sebastian’s heart was in his throat the entire time. The only silver lining was that the slope did indeed even out near the bottom, so while Mallory had to untie herself with a good ten feet left to go, she was able to scramble down the rest of the way without incident.

  A nervous sweat broke out on Sebastian’s forehead as he hauled the rope back up for himself. He wasn’t afraid of heights so much as he was afraid of being buried in literal tons of recycled dirt. But if he could face down Roger and his crew for Lily, he could climb a measly seventy-foot-high cliff, right?

  He almost didn’t make it.

  Halfway down, a large chunk of rock dislodged and went careening down the slope, which made Sebastian’s feet slip out from under him. He slammed face-first into the rubble and bounced, arm twisting awkwardly as it got tangled in the rope. He slid several feet before he managed to regain his grip, and his arm burned where the rope pressed into it. His heart was pounding a thousand miles a minute, but it almost stopped entirely when he felt the entire section of rubble he was lying on begin to slide slowly downward. “Uh, Mallory, you might want to get out of the way,” he called down to the little pool of light thirty feet below him. “I think I started a rockslide.”

  “Roll sideways, you idiot!” she yelled back.

  It was lucky he wasn’t by himself, because the idea of rolling hadn’t even occurred to him. He had been too busy panicking over the realization that any attempt to regain his footing just made the ground beneath him slide faster. Rolling on an almost seventy-degree slope while attached to a rope was no mean feat, but he managed several rotations and then stilled. The rubble he had just left behind slid a few more feet, and then the sound of shifting dirt and pebbles plinking down toward Mallory slowly faded.

  By the time he’d untangled himself from the rope and finished his descent, he had a multitude of new scrapes and bruises plus an impressive rope burn to add to his ‘why-my-life-sucks’ list. But he was alive, and that was the important thing.

  “Come on down, Kip,” he called up into the darkness. “Just watch out for the spot where I slipped.”

  It took Sir Kipling longer to descend than either of them, though to be fair he did have to pick his way carefully without the benefit of a rope. In some places he was forced to simply slide, though his much lighter body meant he didn’t cause any serious disturbances.

  “Getting back up that thing is going to be about as fun as trying to take a shower in a bathroom full of drunken pixies,” Sebastian muttered as he watched Sir Kipling descend the last few feet.

  “You’ve done that before?” Mallory sounded decidedly more intrigued than she had any right to be.

  “Er—I—don’t ask.”

  Sebastian was saved from further interrogation by Sir Kipling who, having reached the bottom, had started nosing about and now looked up at both of them and gave a meow. When they looked at him, he twitched his tail imperiously and headed off into the looming shadows, obviously having found the trail once again. The two of them followed, picking their way over the debris-strewn ground. Sebastian focused on Sir Kipling’s fluffy tail leading them on in the dimness and tried not to look right or left. The shadows around him seemed more frightening now that he could only see as far as their headlamps’ cone of light—which didn’t even begin to reach the edges of the vast emptiness around them. His mind was safe from the things that lurked in the dark, but his memories of them were almost as bad. He was relieved when Mallory nudged him and murmured that they might want to switch back to night vision, in case John Faust had thought to put spying spells around the hidden anchor. His field of vision was severely limited with the goggles, but at least he could see the grainy contours of the floor, walls, and ceiling around him. The air was still and cool, and smelled more musty than before, as if the currents had a harder time reaching this far back into the corners of the earth.

  Sebastian knew they were getting close when his charm suddenly turned into an icicle in his pocket; it felt as if he had just crossed a barrier that kept the magical signature from radiating out through the mine. He put a hand out and caught Mallory’s sleeve, halting her then drawing her close so he could whisper in her ear.

  “You feel that?”

  “Yes.”

  Crouching low, Sebastian snapped his fingers to get Sir Kipling’s attention. The cat flicked his ears back and turned to see what was going on, then trotted over to join them.

  “I think we just passed whatever ward was hiding the anchor’s location. It must be pretty powerful if they couldn’t keep it under wraps less than”—he eyed the wall they’d been heading toward—“thirty feet out. I don’t know a whole lot about magic, but from what Lily has told me, something that powerful makes a big ‘boom’ if it’s broken and the magical energy is released with no control or direction. Lily didn’t mention anything like this at Morgan’s tomb.”

  GREATER DISTANCE MEANS GREATER SPELL PERHAPS.

  “Maybe. They did hide this pretty far away. I bet most wizards can’t cast a spell from so great a distance. Or, John Faust and Morgan could have done that joining hands thingy I’ve seen Lily and Aunt B do. I think they use it to combine their magic and make it stronger.”

  “Father used to do that with Caden. I always wondered…” Mallory trailed off, and Sebastian wondered at the oddly melancholy note in her voice.

  “Okay, so it’s a big bad spell, we agree on that. Can you find it, Kip?”

  THEIR SCENT LEADS DIRECTLY TO IT. He turned his head to stare at the far wall, where it seemed the mine finally came to
an end.

  “I don’t see any runes or anything…” Sebastian squinted, then realized that didn’t actually help him see more clearly through the night-vision goggles.

  “It’s probably hidden by the same spell that was on that wall in the warehouse,” Mallory whispered.

  “Okay, so what’s the plan? We stab it with one of your iron daggers and run like hell?”

  Mallory began to say something, then stood and grabbed Sebastian’s arm to drag him back the way they had come. They went about a hundred yards before Mallory stopped and sank back down onto her heels so that she was closer to Sir Kipling’s height.

  “No.”

  “No?” Sebastian’s brow furrowed.

  “No. We don’t do anything. You’re going back. I’ll take care of this.”

  “What!”

  A painful squeeze of his bicep reminded Sebastian to keep his voice down, and he reached over to grip Mallory’s hand, his hold keeping her from pulling away again.

  “What do you mean? I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Yes, you are. What do you think is going to happen when we break that anchor?”

  “Uhhh—”

  “What will happen is that they will know we’ve destroyed their spell, and they could decide to make a run for it there and then. It took us nearly thirty minutes to get here, and it will take even longer going back with that slope to climb. They could disappear and we might never find them again. Or Lily,” she added as a reluctant afterthought.

  Sebastian swore. Why couldn’t it have been easy, just this once? “Okay, so what if we wait? Let me contact my aunt and see how close they are.”

  NO. WE CANNOT DELAY. EVEN THIS FAR AWAY I CAN FEEL HER TERROR. LILY NEEDS US NOW. NOT LATER. NOW.

  Mallory let out a huff of air and Sebastian pushed up his goggles to rub his face with both hands. When he pulled the eyepiece back down over his face and looked at his hands, he saw that they were shaking.

  “I, uh, don’t suppose you brought any dynamite with you in your handy bag of holding?”

  “My what?”

  “Never mind, geek joke. I was mostly joking about the dynamite, too, because there’s no way you’d be crazy enough to...” he trailed off, looking hard at Mallory. Facial expressions were hard to decipher from the weirdly negative and blotchy picture you got through infrared goggles, but it looked an awful lot like Mallory was smirking...

  “Wait, you mean you did bring explosives?”

  Mallory’s shoulders twitched in a shrug. “Nothing that would destroy a warded object. Enough C4 might be able to overwhelm the ward’s capacity to absorb energy, but only if they used a standard shield spell. There’s no telling what my father is capable of. I don’t know enough about the mechanics of magic to be sure raw destructive energy would work. We have to use wrought iron.”

  Trying not to dwell on the terrifying idea of Mallory with C4 at her disposal, Sebastian considered their options. “Hey, didn’t you buy some iron grenades off your guy Chief?”

  “Iron salt grenades, and yes, I did. But they aren’t real grenades, at least not the kind built to kill people. They’re more like flashbangs packed with a salt compound. Even if I timed it perfectly, I doubt the salt would have the penetration power to get through the ward and still have enough energy behind it to destroy the anchor. I’ll have to shoot the anchor instead.”

  “Like, with a gun?” Sebastian asked. She still had her paintball gun strapped in its harness, though she’d shifted it to the back to stay mostly hidden under her pack when they’d been in the warehouse.

  Mallory’s eyes were obscured by her night-vision goggles, but Sebastian could hear the eye roll in her voice. “No, with my finger. Of course a gun, you moron. All Chief’s ammo is a conventional lead core copper jacket with an iron ball crimped into the hollow point. It enables the shot to pierce most shield spells and still allow the lead bullet behind it to expand and do damage. According to Chief, there are some active shield spells that work by absorbing kinetic energy, and nothing gets through those if the wizard knows what they’re doing. But those aren’t the kind of spells you can set into a ward.”

  “Okay, so how are you going to shoot it in the dark?”

  “You leave that to me, Blackwell. Now, you two get going. The moment the anchor is broken, everything in the loop will appear back in real time, correct? So you’ve got to be there, ready to move the second that happens. I’ll give you forty-five minutes to get back, so that would be...three fifteen. Give me your watch so I can make sure we’re synced up.”

  “But we can’t just leave you here in the dark,” Sebastian protested weakly as Mallory tipped her goggles up out of her eyes and grabbed his wrist. She used a tiny red penlight to check both their watches and spent a minute fiddling with his until she was satisfied the two were synchronized down to the second.

  “I’ll be fine. I’ve trained my whole life to operate on my own. Just remember to toss the end of the rope down for me after you climb up. I’ll follow our footprints back and come as fast as I can.” What she left unsaid was, and I hope there will be enough of you left over to save by the time I get there.

  Sebastian rose with her this time as she stood, then dug in his pocket and put the porthole in her hand. “Look, if you’re staying, then take this. It’s called a porthole and it’s a sort of wizard cell-phone-ish thingy. There’s no way your phone works down here, so you may need it to get in touch with Aunt B in case—well, in case anything happens. I tried calling her while you were climbing down that slope to let her know what we were doing, but she didn’t answer—asleep I guess.” He told Mallory how to use the porthole and made her repeat the activation phrase, which she did very reluctantly. Her distaste was obvious to see, even through the odd distortion of the night-vision goggles. “Promise me you’ll use it if you need to, okay?”

  Mallory did not move, and Sebastian sighed.

  “Fine. Just...be careful, okay? See if you can find a pillar or something to hide behind when you shoot. There’s no telling what kind of concussion there’ll be from that much magic.”

  “You just make sure you survive until I get there, Blackwell,” she said, her quiet voice devoid of the normal sentiment that two emotionally well-adjusted human beings might feel at such a moment.

  Of course, describing Mallory as emotionally well-adjusted was like describing a rampaging grizzly as “cute” or “harmless.”

  “And try not to incapacitate my father too thoroughly,” she added, her tone turning dark. “He and I have some...unresolved business to discuss.”

  Sebastian felt the urge to shudder, and he hoped Mallory never had any unresolved business to discuss with him. It sounded like it would be a decidedly unpleasant experience. “No problem, I’ll make sure I leave him breathing.” He meant it as a joke, feeble though it was, but Mallory nodded gravely in response.

  “Good. Now get out of here.”

  Yup, so much for sentimental goodbyes.

  “Good luck to you too,” he whispered.

  “Luck has nothing to do with it. Remember, three fifteen on the dot. Go.”

  He went.

  ***

  Sir Kipling led the way back to the mountain of rubble, and Sebastian stood to the side and waited while the cat made his slow, laborious way up it. Watching his companion place his paws so carefully and yet still slide on every other step did not fill Sebastian with confidence. How the heck was he going to pull himself up that death trap? He was not in the habit of needing to haul his full body weight up an almost vertical slope, and definitely not while still recovering from bruised ribs and sleep deprivation. Having been blessed with athletic genes, he had taken shameless advantage of them in high school and was able to outperform most of the other boys while only working half as hard. He’d never gotten in the habit of exercising regularly. In fact, he thought of it as unnecessary torture—a sentiment that was coming back to bite him with a vengeance.

  With a final heave, Sir Kipling scrambled ov
er the top edge of the slope. With the cat safely in place, Sebastian now had no more excuse to delay. He glanced at his watch.

  Two forty-three.

  The first twenty feet where the slope was more gentle and the footing more firm weren’t too difficult. It was when he hit the loose dirt and gravel that things got tricky. He tried digging in his toes and climbing, but the footing gave way just as often as it held, and after five minutes of struggling he’d barely made it fifteen feet farther up. He tried using the rope to pull himself up, but didn’t have the upper-body strength to haul up his entire weight when his footing kept slipping. He tried crawling, and when that didn’t work, scooting backward on his butt. But all his struggling only made the rubble more unstable, until he found himself right back where he’d started, now exhausted and covered in dirt.

  Two fifty-three.

  Taking in shallow gulps of air and holding his aching ribs, he looked up to shine his light on Sir Kipling’s watchful face peering over the edge. “I—I don’t know if—if I can make it,” he said. Panic seized him at the thought, and his body flashed hot, then cold. He felt weaker than ever and could sense black defeat like a physical thing lurking in the darkness beyond his halo of light.

  DO NOT BE RIDICULOUS. YOU WERE GIVEN A BRAIN. USE IT.

  “Won’t—won’t do me much good if—my arms and legs give out.”

  THEY WILL NOT. I HAVE FAITH IN YOU, SEBASTIAN. ALSO, IF YOU LET LILY DIE I WILL PEE ON EVERY ITEM YOU OWN FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

  Sebastian laughed, which turned into a cough, and he dug in his pack for the water bottle Mallory had put there. He drank the entire thing, then replaced it and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Way to turn a vote of confidence into a terrifying threat, Kip. Except, cats don’t live longer than, what, fifteen or twenty years? I’ll just wait a while before I buy anything nice.”