City of Spells

by Alexandra Christo

  “Come on,” she said. “Enough staring at the odd architecture of the Uskhanyans. Karam said we’ve got a lot of ground to cover and that means no time to soak up the sun or go for a swim with the spirits.”

  Arjun recoiled like the thought made him shiver.

  For a Spiritcrafter, he had a surprisingly odd reaction to ghost stories. Karam was tempted to tease him about it, but she was nice enough to reconsider embarrassing him in front of the Kin.

  Asees began to walk and the Crafters followed.

  For a moment Karam hung back, taking one last look at the serene shores. Arjun sheathed his sword and they walked in step along the wet sand, toward the grassy verge that overlooked them.

  And then Karam stopped.

  Her father’s pendant grew warm around her neck, and though Karam didn’t know why, it made her heartbeat quicken.

  “What is it?” Arjun asked.

  Karam swallowed and held up a hand to silence him.

  Her eyes narrowed as the wind slowly drifted by, in and out of the wildflowers, through Karam’s hair and across the moonlit waters.

  Such serenity.

  Such peace.

  Such quiet.

  Her father’s pendant grew hotter.

  Where were the mourners?

  Where were the caretakers, sprinkling the sand with trick dust to keep the magic in harmony?

  Where were the doves that Tavia had told her soared over the sky like gatekeepers?

  “Stop!” Karam yelled.

  Asees whipped her head back to face her.

  Time slowed and there was a moment—a moment that existed within the grains of sand that housed the dead, between the breaths of wind and the blinking of the stars—when Asees frowned.

  A moment when Karam thought that maybe she was just paranoid and there was nothing wrong with a little silence in the world.

  The Crafters all looked to her, their backs to the grassy verge and the monstrous things it hid.

  Karam’s pendant burned against her chest, with the same might as Saxony’s fire would have.

  Asees parted her lips in a question.

  And then the sword appeared.

  Through her stomach, straight like an arrow.

  For a second, Asees stood there with that same question on her lips. And then in place of the question there was blood. On her lips and her teeth, and when she looked down to see the sword for herself, it disappeared. Pulled back from the other side.

  Asees fell to her knees.

  Her attacker did not smile or blink or cast a look down at her body.

  Karam charged.

  She cut and slashed and kicked and stabbed without thinking or seeing. Her vision was filled with fury and fury alone, no space for reality, save for the glimpse of Arjun skidding across the verge and cradling Asees in his arms.

  But it was just another moment.

  Just another grain of time.

  Arjun was screaming, a noise the likes of which Karam had never heard. One she hoped she would never, ever hear again.

  His Kin turned back to the verge and from its green depths, an onslaught rose.

  Soldiers, more than double their numbers. All with eager snarls on their faces and those same black eyes Asees had when she’d been under the thrall of Ashwood.

  The brands of the Loj on their necks looked almost like staves.

  An attacker approached Arjun from behind and he leaped from the ground and drove a knife through the man’s throat.

  “To the death!” Arjun yelled.

  The Kin screamed in unison, echoing his cries with swords and magic raised high in the air.

  Karam pulled someone’s head back by their hair and plunged her knife into their heart.

  She ran across the shores, sand splashing up to her thighs, and launched herself into the air until her legs were wrapped around a man’s throat and he tried to hit and punch at her calves.

  This would be their mourning.

  Killing these people would be their solace. It didn’t matter if they were outnumbered two to one. These Crafters were already dead.

  Karam squeezed tighter, angled her body to the right, and felt the snap of the man’s neck.

  The beach was alight with magic. It filled the air, so thick that Karam could taste it, almost choke on it. She coughed it up like it was sand. Bright gold swirls of fire and the roll of thunder. Bodies were dropping everywhere.

  There was blood all over her and Karam didn’t know what was hers and what had been their enemy’s.

  It didn’t matter.

  She didn’t feel pain, just thirst.

  The unholy need to destroy each and every one of these monsters.

  The Kingpin knew they would come for Wesley.

  His people had been waiting, hidden like hunters in the forest.

  Nolan.

  Karam would be damned if she died on this beach without making it back to Saxony. She made her way through the army in blood and death.

  These infected soldiers could not be saved, the Loj was too far in their veins, and even if they could, Karam would not give them that chance.

  Now that Asees was dead, Karam would make each of them pay for it with their souls.

  If they still even had souls.

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out one of Tavia’s trick bags. She threw it at a nearby Crafter and he froze in place, turned to ice on the balmy shores.

  Karam threw a knife at him and he shattered into the sand.

  These people were not warriors.

  They were just the dead waiting to find graves.

  She reached for another charm.

  Tavia had been trying to teach her how to read them—to know what they could do and to let their magic flow through her like a melody—but Karam could sense nothing but her own rage and so she just threw the charm high above her and watched it flutter back down like a bird.

  And then explode.

  Four Crafters flew into the air, crashing through the glass headstones until finally landing back on the shores with a bone-crunching thud.

  Dead. Gone.

  She ran over to Arjun, who was clutching at his side with one hand and cradling Asees’s body with the other. Asees was still, but the blood kept coming. From her mouth and her stomach and by the spirits Karam didn’t know how to make it stop.

  Arjun put a hand over Asees’s wound and closed his eyes, muttering desperately. Some kind of a spell, Karam assumed, and she felt a spark that maybe it was a healing spell and everything would be all right.

  Arjun’s hands were shaking, alight in the gold magic of their people. His eyes were squeezed shut so tight that his nose wrinkled.

  And then Karam turned, just as a man charged at them. His blackened eyes were like that of a wild animal and the mark of the Loj elixir was thick and gleaming on his neck.

  He launched a shard of light at Karam and she leaped to avoid it, then swung her foot out and swept the man’s legs out from under him.

  “We will be saved,” he said, pulling out a gun. “We must protect the magic.”

  Karam did not hesitate.

  She cut her knife clean across his neck, before he even had the chance to raise his weapon, pressing her lips together tightly so she didn’t have to taste the victory.

  “Come on,” Arjun said.

  He was still focused on Asees, his hands aglow and hovering over the hole in her stomach.

  “This has to work,” he said. “Come on, Asees. Wake up.”

  The magic flickered weakly under his palms, like a light trying to stay on in a storm. Only Asees didn’t move and the blood didn’t crawl from the sand and back into her still body.

  Arjun sobbed, the cry of agony so sharp that Karam felt it stab into her heart.

  He dropped his hands and the lights went out.

  “Please wake up,” he said.

  He buried his head in Asees’s shoulder.

  “Arjun,” Karam said.

  She knelt down beside him and looked a
t the gash on his side. The sand mingled with the blood, sprinkling across his wound like trick dust. She wondered if he would ever get that out, or if it would embed inside of him forever. Little pieces of the dead shores and their ghostly magic, waiting for the day they would return to this hallowed ground.

  “Arjun,” Karam said again.

  He looked up at her and shook his head. “She can’t do this,” he said. The tears dripped to his neck. “She can’t leave me like this. She can’t just go.”

  Karam reached up an unsteady hand and placed it on his shoulder.

  The world around them was so quiet.

  “I’m here,” she said. “Arjun, it will be okay.”

  “No.”

  His voice was a breath in the night.

  Arjun shook his head, his tears mixing with the blood on Asees’s hand.

  “Nothing is okay. She’s gone, Karam.”

  He looked around the beach, at the bodies of his Kin, scattered among the headstones. So many graves.

  “They’re all gone.”

  Karam couldn’t move.

  Even as the tears crawled down her own face, as hot as her rage, she could not speak or move her hand from his shoulder.

  She was just still.

  Asees was not coming back.

  The six of their Kin that Karam had convinced to come here would never return to their families.

  Nolan, she thought.

  He had led them into a trap. Ashwood’s people weren’t guarding Wesley. They were waiting, for Karam and whoever else dared to come.

  It was an ambush and if Nolan had told Ashwood where they would go looking for Wesley, then that meant he had told Ashwood where to go looking for them.

  The forest.

  Saxony.

  Tavia.

  Nobody was safe.

  There was a small grunt from behind Karam and she slowly turned her head to follow the noise. Her limbs felt heavy; everything about the world was off balance.

  It took her a few seconds to make sense of it, but the man by her feet, who Karam had sliced across the neck, was still alive.

  He was bleeding enough to turn the sand red, but he was still breathing, which was more than she could say for Asees.

  Karam hated him for surviving.

  How dare he cling to life when Asees could not?

  Arjun gently placed Asees’s head back to the sand and looked at the man groaning beside them. He wiped a hand across his face to smear away the tears.

  “We have to perform an extraction,” Arjun said. His voice was as small as a child’s. “Before he dies. We must see if he knows anything.”

  Karam nodded. She said nothing, but squeezed Arjun’s shoulder and tried to hold back any more of her own tears.

  She would be strong for him.

  For her friend, for her brother, for the warrior boy who needed her now more than ever.

  Arjun turned the man onto his back and without ceremony or warning, he pressed his hands on either side of the Crafter’s temples and began.

  Karam had only ever seen an extraction once before, when Saxony had performed it on the consort back in Creije, all those months ago, to find out where Ashwood was hiding.

  Saxony had always said extractions were dark magic, because the worst kind of spells were the ones that took over people’s minds and sought to ravage their thoughts. It was meant to be agonizing for the victim—if they even survived—and it was meant to bring bad luck to the Crafter who performed it, cursing their entire Kin.

  The magic had been outlawed for so long, but these were times of war and they were all already so cursed that it hardly seemed to matter anymore.

  Arjun’s hand shot out to Karam’s, but he kept the other on the man’s temple, not breaking the connection.

  “He’s an Intuitcrafter,” Arjun said.

  The same as Zekia.

  The same as Wesley.

  Intuitcrafters could see into all the futures of the world, all the possibilities of what was to come and what had already been.

  “He’ll die once I break the connection,” Arjun said. “But you need to see this.”

  “You want me to go inside his mind?”

  “You must see,” Arjun urged, his hand still stretched out. “Give me your hand.”

  Karam threaded her fingers quickly through his.

  The vision did not flow through her. It did not coat her mind like a warm blanket or ease into her sight.

  It hit her like a thousand fists.

  At first Karam could make out nothing but flashing images and voices so loud that they drilled into her skull. The world was a mess of colors and sound, and no matter how hard Karam tried, she couldn’t make sense of it.

  She just knew she didn’t belong in this place and the place knew it too.

  The Crafter’s mind wanted her gone and it was going to do whatever it took to expel her.

  Arjun squeezed Karam’s hand and the world focused, just a little.

  She felt a pulling in her stomach, like there was a string wrapped around her insides and someone was yanking it harshly toward them.

  Karam closed her eyes.

  The pulling grew more violent. She felt her body convulse and the piercing noises got louder and louder.

  Then everything went still.

  Karam opened her eyes with hesitance, not quite ready to face the world of unending madness and voices screaming in her ears.

  But there was nothing.

  When she looked to her hand, still clutched tightly in Arjun’s, it was alight in the gold of his magic, tethering her to him.

  “Look,” Arjun said.

  He pointed and Karam finally saw.

  Wesley stood in the shadows, that familiar half smile on his lips. He seemed taller than Karam remembered and though he was thinner, he still looked very much like Wesley. There was a brand of arrogance and ego to his smile that could never be lost. Tavia was by his side, and in front of them both was Zekia.

  Was the Kingpin.

  Dante Ashwood was as much a ghost as ever, with his cane clutched in his spindly fingers the only solid part of him. Everything else was shadow and bone.

  He placed a hand on Zekia’s shoulder.

  “My little warrior,” he said. “Make me proud.”

  Zekia nodded.

  Karam’s eyes widened.

  She had Wesley’s gun.

  Zekia raised the weapon in the air, pointing it straight at Tavia.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t do this sooner,” she said.

  And then she pulled the trigger.

  Karam yelled out, but the vision broke and she was already being pulled back into reality, flung so hard into the real world that she hit the sand with a painful thud.

  Her head felt like it had been cracked in two as the Shores of the Dead flooded into her vision. Karam tried to make sense of what she had just seen, and what was real and what wasn’t.

  It took her longer than it should have.

  So long that it was too late by the time Karam realized the cracking sound hadn’t just been the bullet hitting Tavia square in the chest.

  Arjun was slumped on the shores in front of her, a bullet in his leg.

  Her necklace grew warm again.

  Karam turned in a snarl.

  And then another shot sounded.

  Her body jolted and she felt a burning, unimaginable pain.

  Right where her heart was.

  Right where she kept Saxony and every promise that she had made.

  Karam fell to the sand beside Arjun and let the darkness take her.

  14

  WESLEY

  The forest wasn’t hard to infiltrate.

  Wesley was out of practice when it came to being stealthy, but even he had little trouble sneaking past the guard and wandering into the forest like he very much belonged there.

  It might have been the Crafter in him, helping him stick to the shadows—or the shadows stick to him—or it might have been because the forest was woefully gu
arded for a rebellion.

  Either way, Wesley was in.

  He just wasn’t sure why he’d felt the need to sneak past the guards in the first place. He could have easily introduced himself and explained that he was on their side. Even if they hadn’t believed him and thought every bruise on his body was some kind of infiltration tactic, the worst they could do was bring him to their leader or try to put him in chains.

  It wasn’t like he’d never been in chains before.

  And it wasn’t like he didn’t have a good in with their leader.

  Perhaps the sneaking was just an old habit, like the not trusting people and the need to prove that he could do whatever he put his mind to.

  Maybe he needed it, this small and tiny victory, after being lost for so long.

  After swimming for his damn life in water so cold it felt like being shot at a hundred times over.

  Wesley strolled through the center of the camp.

  It was surrounded by streams that reminded him of Creije. Wesley didn’t want to think about it, but it always came to him in the quiet moments.

  The home he’d let fall to its knees.

  He placed a hand on the trunk of a nearby tree and felt the rough bark beneath his fingers. In an instant, the tree seemed to spring to life, letting out a long exhale, its leaves fluttering in a windswept applause. The forest began to sing, a sweet melody that Wesley was so sure he’d heard before. The branches of each shrub and tree and sapling jerked back and forth in a wave, and Wesley couldn’t help but smile.

  This forest, evergreen and aglow in ancient magic, felt happy to see him. It welcomed him like an old friend.

  This way, it whispered excitedly. Quickly, come this way.

  The leaves of the trees, veined silver like Wesley’s staves, rustled to his left, and Wesley followed them like they were a compass. He wasn’t sure where they were leading him or why, but he didn’t care. He knew somehow, somewhere deep down, that it was taking him where he needed to go.

  The clearing was sparse and at first Wesley thought that he was alone, but after a few short moments, four figures emerged from the distance.

  One was Saxony, talking animatedly to an older woman on her right. The woman sighed, the man next to her shrugged, and then the three of them stopped walking altogether and formed a makeshift circle. They looked like they were arguing about something, but Wesley didn’t care enough to try to listen. His focus was pulled toward the fourth person. The girl who had broken away from them and was twirling her knives absentmindedly on a nearby log.