Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus Identity

by Lydia Sherrer

  The sight of John Faust, a man Sebastian had always hated and feared, groveling at Morgan’s feet, finally brought home how deeply and terribly screwed they all were.

  When Aunt B and the hoped-for cavalry finally arrived, they would not be coming to the rescue. They would be coming to meet their doom. Whatever plans Morgan had for them, Sebastian had no idea, but if the symbols on the floor were any indication, it would not be good.

  And here he was, locked away and helpless, hanging on to sanity by a mere thread.

  Heaven and earth help them, what had he led them all into?

  4

  What Defines Us

  Seventy-two.

  It had been seventy-two hours since Richard had kidnapped Lily, and all Sebastian could think about was that he was going to die watching another man hold her in his arms. He was going to die without telling Lily he loved her.

  Yes, he had saved her life—for another few hours. But as soon as Morgan decided everything was prepared to her satisfaction, she would turn her attention to her prisoners, and there would be no resistance. Not from her kind of power. He’d gone over the math a dozen times in his head while slumped against the wall of his cage, fingers wrapped around Lily’s cold hand. No matter how many speed limit laws Aunt B broke, they couldn’t possibly arrive in time to stop Morgan from doing whatever the heck it was she had planned. He would fight back, of course. But he had no illusions about his chances.

  He was considering an attempt at the cage’s locks, spelled or not, when the warehouse lights suddenly winked out.

  The witches guarding the warehouse entrance shouted in surprise just as a loud bang echoed through the room. Sounds of chaos erupted from the door, but unlike when Sebastian had ambushed them, this time the wizards were ready. Magic-fueled light, golden and steady, flared to life around Morgan and John Faust, sending the shadows fleeing back to the edges of the room. Richard shifted uneasily and Sebastian rose to his knees, straining to see what was going on without letting go of Lily’s hand.

  A fierce battle had broken out on the other side of the room. Two figures Sebastian didn’t recognize lay nearby, as if they had come through the door first and been hit with whatever defensive spells Morgan had set. There was no telling if they were dead or unconscious, and Sebastian didn’t give them more than a fleeting glance. It was the group of people engaged with the witches that stole all his attention: two more unfamiliar wizards, a man and a woman, closely followed by Aunt B and Mrs. Singer. The air grew thick with magic as red light flashed and several demons popped into existence, then lunged at the wizards like attack dogs.

  “I want them alive!” Morgan cried out. Her swirling black raiment billowed behind her in trailing shadows as she strode toward the fight, while John Faust brought up the much more reluctant rear.

  Six witches with their demons, though certainly nasty, were not a match for four well-trained wizards. The two strangers set up a defensive wall in front while Aunt B and Mrs. Singer stood behind, hands joined as they cast spell after spell. Sebastian had never seen wizards fight as a group before, but it was an awe-inspiring sight. Their magic made the air ripple and flash like a heatwave and sheet lightning rolled into one. They might even have triumphed, if the witches and demons were all they faced.

  But they were not.

  A massive wave of energy billowed toward the fight, bowling over witch, wizard, and demon alike. Before the combatants could recover, Morgan was there, the darkness that followed her stretching around and over her like giant tentacles to grab at her victims. For a moment Sebastian was sure it was all over, but every time the inky tentacles tried to touch one of his friends, it pulled back as if burnt and Morgan screamed in frustration. Had Aunt B created wards that would protect them from the demon she’d known they’d surely face? He remembered the book containing celestial sigils he’d found in his aunt’s library when he was sixteen, the same sigils that had saved his life that horrible, foolish night when he’d made the biggest mistake of his life.

  Hope flared for a moment in his chest, but it was short-lived. The difference between Roger and Morgan was that Roger was mundane, with nothing to his name apart from the demon’s power. Morgan, on the other hand, had all the power she needed to carry the fight on her own after Afnergu’alak’s demonic magic was rebuffed. She waded into the fray, beautiful and terrible in her fury until Aunt B’s little group stood with their backs to the warehouse wall, surrounded and beaten down.

  After that, it was all over.

  Sebastian tore his eyes away from the sight of Mrs. Singer held between two witches, struggling and yelling such foul language at Morgan that Sebastian no longer wondered where Lily got her fiery temper. Aunt B had fallen to the floor, apparently overcome by exhaustion, and she put up no fight as John Faust lifted her up and helped her lean against him. The other two wizards were subdued by the remaining witches as Morgan looked on, standing like an obsidian pillar, the dog-demons crouched at her feet. They snarled and struggled, as if they longed to attack but were being held back, and at a wave of Morgan’s hand, they winked out of sight in little flashes of red.

  Something fell on Sebastian’s leg, then clinked to the floor as a familiar whisper spoke behind him.

  “Hey, idiot. Stop gawking and make yourself useful.”

  Sebastian twisted around just in time to see a stealthy figure disappear behind stacks of crates and equipment, her movements nearly invisible among the shadows cast by the wizards’ magical light.

  “Mallory?” Sebastian hissed, but there was no reply. He looked down at the floor of his cage to see a long, slender, black spike.

  The iron hair stick.

  A grim smile touched Sebastian’s lips and he took a slow breath, bracing himself for what he had to do.

  “Richard, do you know how to pick locks?” he whispered.

  The FBI agent tore his eyes away from the warehouse door and fixed them on Sebastian. They were wide and dazed, and Sebastian could see the mindless terror lurking in their depths, the same terror he would soon be facing.

  Sebastian reached through the cage bars and gave Richard’s leg a hard pinch. “Come on, you worthless pile of steaming rat turds. I don’t trust you farther than I can throw you, and I want nothing more than to pound your face in until it resembles ground beef. But that wouldn’t help us get out of here, so you need to get a grip, find your spine—if you even have one—and listen to me. Got it?”

  The man flinched away, but his eyes came into focus, a glare replacing his deer-in-the-headlights look.

  “I’ve made my fair share of mistakes,” Richard growled. “But I’m a proud agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I know how to do my job. If it weren’t for all this supernatural hocus pocus nonsense, I’d have done something long before now. I already tried breaking out, and Mr. LeFay had to explain to that scary Morgan lady what human law enforcement was and that killing me would be an ‘inconvenience’ at this juncture.” The FBI agent’s jaw flexed, and for a moment Sebastian felt some sympathy for the man, stuck in a cage and unable to do anything at all for days.

  Then he remembered whose backstabbing betrayal had gotten them all in this mess in the first place, and his sympathy vanished.

  “Yeah, whatever. You’re a real hero. Now look, I’m going to pick the lock of this cage, then I need you to pick yours. After that, we’ve got to get those cuffs off Lily and figure out how to wake her up.”

  Richard’s lips formed a grim line and he nodded.

  Taking one last shuddering breath, Sebastian braced himself and let go of Lily’s hand. The nausea and terror that rolled over him were just as bad as he’d expected them to be, and they settled on him like a suffocating, radioactive cloud, slowly poisoning him. But he fixed Lily’s face in his mind and kept his mantra going, drowning out the clamoring voices by sheer stubborn focus until they became an annoying hiss of background noise.

  It always amazed Sebastian how clueless people were when it came to the vulnerabiliti
es of locks. Most were absurdly easy to pick with the most rudimentary of tools when you knew how it was done. The iron hair stick cut through the spell shielding the padlock like a knife through hot butter, and in his expert hands it was no time at all before he heard that satisfying click of victory—which was fortunate since his fingers tingled more and more painfully with each passing moment. Sebastian quietly slid the padlock off the door latch and hid it behind him, counting on his enemy’s preoccupation with invading wizards to keep them from noticing the lock’s mysterious disappearance. He didn’t dare open his cage to pick the other lock himself. Excessive movement or anything out of place might catch someone’s eye. Instead, he carefully passed the hair stick to Richard and muttered instructions out of the side of his mouth while he kept one eye on the rest of the room. He could only devote a fraction of his attention to what was going on, but it sounded like Morgan had ordered John Faust to search their prisoners and find “those vile celestial wards.”

  It took Richard considerably longer to accomplish what Sebastian could do in his sleep. Sebastian kept glancing toward the warehouse door and he watched as Morgan put her prisoners under her thrall and directed the witches to split off, one paired with each wizard. To Sebastian’s relief, it looked like the two who had fallen at the beginning had only been knocked unconscious. They were now on their feet, each in the grip of a witch, but instead of being blank-faced and relaxed, their expressions flicked between grimaces of pain and dazed confusion, looks that were shared by Aunt B and the rest of their allies. Sebastian looked at Morgan and saw tendons standing out in her neck. Was the strain of controlling so many weakening her grip? If so, it wasn’t enough to allow anyone to break free, and the prisoners gave little resistance as they were dragged toward the giant casting circle.

  Finally, the lock on Richard’s cage popped open and the FBI agent slid it off and hid it in his pocket. Dragging his eyes away from the middle of the room, Sebastian turned and focused his full attention on Lily, who Richard had gently propped up in the corner of the cage.

  “Those are enchanted cuffs and collar,” Sebastian said after a moment of examination. “See the runes all over them? They’re probably keeping Lily asleep and maybe even suppressing her magic. Either way, we have to get them off. That hair stick is iron, so it can sometimes cut through spells. Try holding it against one of the cuffs.”

  Richard did so, but there was no sign that it did anything at all. There was no keyhole, hinge, or latch visible on either the cuffs or collar, and Sebastian worried that only magic could open them. Despair welled up, and the white noise in the back of his mind suddenly became words again, each one cutting into him like a knife.

  There is no hope.

  You are a failure.

  Everyone you love is going to die.

  “Hey, hey! Sebastian, are you okay? Stay with me.”

  Richard’s voice, of all things, broke through the clamor, and Sebastian found himself on his hands and knees, panting and shaking like a whipped dog. He latched on to the agent’s voice and the smoldering anger it triggered, and shook his head to clear it. “I’m fine,” he snapped, then looked back at Lily and forced himself to concentrate. What else could they do? He reached through the cage bars again and laid his left hand on one of the cuffs.

  “Try scratching the tip of that hair stick through some of the runes,” Sebastian said.

  This time, he felt the cuff warm slightly beneath his hand as tingles raced up his arm from his ward ring. “That’s it,” he said, withdrawing his hand. “Try scratching through all the runes you can find, mar them as much as possible.”

  Richard went to work, though it soon became clear it wouldn’t be as easy as it had first seemed. Whatever metal the cuffs were made out of—it seemed like silver but what did he know—was tough and their hair stick was slender and delicate. Its tip bent easily, and Richard had to keep rotating it and bending it back. Gradually, the tip deformed, and it became harder and harder to find a bit sharp enough to make scratches. Sebastian began to lose hope again that they would ever get Lily free, but then there was a soft pop and a seam appeared in the metal where there had been none before. Richard hurriedly pulled the cuff off and laid it out of sight, its once polished surface now crisscrossed with dozens of messy gouges.

  “Quick, the other one and the collar,” Sebastian urged, turning to scan the dark recesses of the room. He had no idea where Mallory or Sir Kipling were, but knowing them they were probably crouched just out of sight, waiting for their chance to pounce. If he could get himself and Lily into position as well, they would be ready to fight back.

  A flare of red light snapped his gaze to the center of the room, and his breath caught in his lungs at the sight. The familiar scene made him squeeze his eyes shut, but he couldn’t escape the vision burned into his memory: a dusty room in an old brick-front department store; three circles drawn in shining blood on the floor; Meg’s pale face filled with fear, guilt, and sorrow.

  You killed her. YOU KILLED HER.

  Sebastian forced his eyes open again, desperate for any distraction, even the terrible thing about to unfold before him.

  In each of the six summoning circles stood a witch shoulder to shoulder with a wizard. Even his Aunt B stood there, her skin gray as ash and her limbs trembling, held in place by a will not her own. Cassius was positioned with one of the wizards Sebastian didn’t recognize, and Sebastian’s eyes flicked around for a moment, searching for the seventh witch. He spotted the tall, dark man at John Faust’s side well back from the edge of the silver paint. Both of them stood in relaxed but watchful poses as they faced the center of the casting circle where Morgan le Fay towered over all, arms upraised and outstretched as she chanted in Enkinim. She glowed with dark power, and her skin looked so pale Sebastian could see her veins pulsing beneath it. Her long, black hair floated in lazy ribbons around her head, mirroring the dark tendrils that coiled about her feet. She looked as if she might rise off the floor at any moment and be suspended in the air by the building energy Sebastian could feel pressing against his lungs and tingling across his skin. He couldn’t even begin to fathom what Morgan was preparing to do, but he knew he had to stop it.

  “Hurry.” He could barely force the word past the tightness in his throat and the roaring in his head. The voices were louder, but for some inexplicable reason they were no longer directed at Sebastian’s mind. They were blubbering pleas, crying adulations, and screaming curses. To him.

  Afnergu’alak.

  A clank of metal brought Sebastian’s eyes into focus, and he gripped the bars of the cage, using his arms to forcibly turn his body away from the center of the room. No one seemed to notice the noise of the second manacle hitting the cage floor, and Richard was no longer trying to hide his movements as he scratched frantically at the collar around Lily’s neck. His hand slipped a few times, and the hair stick left angry, crimson lines across Lily’s delicate skin. Each one made Sebastian flinch, fingers clutching the bars in front of him so tightly the tendons in his arms burned and cramped.

  At last the collar dropped free, revealing the red skin beneath where it had rubbed against Lily’s neck.

  “Give me her hand,” Sebastian said urgently, letting go of the bars to stretch across the space between them. Richard gently shifted Lily closer, careful to support her head as he changed positions. As Sebastian squeezed Lily’s cold fingers, he ached to wrap his arms around her slender frame and press his lips to her forehead.

  But all he could reach was her hand.

  He held it tightly with one of his and stroked the back of it with a reverent touch. “Lily. Lily, please, wake up. We need you. I need you.” He didn’t look at Richard while he spoke. He simply repeated the words over and over again as his heart and soul breathed a broken plea, hoping against hope to be heard.

  She did not wake.

  “Hearken to me, my kinsmen! You are about to partake in the making of history. By your sacrifice, a grievous wrong will be righted, a vil
e injustice avenged.”

  Morgan’s voice rang out, echoing off the warehouse’s cavernous roof as each word shivered with purpose and power. Against his will, Sebastian turned his head again, unable to look away from such a command for attention.

  “By the hand of Gilgamesh was this artifact crafted, to ensure the supremacy of wizardkind against all others. Long has it been since its power was bent to its true purpose, but now I, Queen of Avalon, shall fulfill its calling. By will and word I summon the immortal forces from their dark realm and bind them together with each of you to serve as a conduit for your everlasting power. Your miserable lives will be given over to a greater purpose, and your Queen will remember your sacrifice as she retakes what is hers. So I speak, and so shall it be.” The air around Morgan shivered with power—Sebastian could smell it now, the biting scent of ozone that seared his lungs as he drew in each hot breath.

  By all that was sacred and holy, what was she doing?

  A rapid series of booms cracked through the thick air, and Morgan staggered as several bullets hit an invisible shield around her and went whizzing off into the darkness.

  It took the wizard mere seconds to recover, and she turned only her head toward the attack, keeping her hands upraised.

  “Find it and stop it,” she commanded in tones that carried the compulsion of magic. John Faust and the lone witch dashed off toward the rows of ceiling-high shelves, and Sebastian’s heart leapt into his throat.

  He willed Mallory to run, to hide, even as he squeezed Lily’s hand tighter and begged her to wake. Dimly, he heard Richard’s soft voice calling Lily’s name, and through his grip on her hand he could feel the FBI agent shaking her, gently at first, then harder.

  More shots echoed through the warehouse from the depths of the shelves, and there was a furious yowl that made Sebastian’s gut clench. Then, silence.