Real Magic

by Chloe Garner

  She would have closed her eyes, satisfaction, if her body had had the freedom, but instead she watched as a tendril of smoke came up out of the cast, straight up at her onlooking face. It curled around her cheek and flirted with her eyelashes, then presumably continued on up toward the ceiling, but Valerie couldn’t move her head to look. The phoenix necklace slipped out of her sweater, calling the smoke to it like a magnet, and the smoke changed from a thin gray to a solid thread of orange, forming serpentine patterns around the phoenix, the chain. The pendant glowed red.

  Like metal melting, Valerie felt the cast that was holding her begin to weaken.

  From the cast on the floor, there was a strobe of bright pink flame that flickered once, twice, three times and then fell quiet.

  For several seconds, the scientists looked on, intent, then Valerie saw their posture change as they concluded that she’d failed.

  Valerie watched, knowing that she hadn’t.

  The flame wasn’t supposed to continue. It was there to fuse several ingredients that were inert until you applied heat, but that would consume in the fire if it went on for too long. Getting a flame as a heat source that could self-extinguish like that had been very tricky; Valerie at least knew enough to appreciate that she couldn’t have ever solved it in the time that she had. Whatever source her knowledge came from, it was more clever than she was.

  The fused ingredients reacted as the green flame continued to die down toward the floor, and Valerie struggled, trying to get her body to do something as she sat there, just waiting to see who won the race - her cast or the scientists waiting to come get her.

  Would they just kill her outright? They had no idea who she was, no reason to preserve her life as a lever on her mother’s.

  One of the scientists went to get a long, sharp blade from a desk, which seemed to answer that.

  There was a strange, sweet scent off of the cast, and the green flame extinguished entirely.

  The man with the knife stepped forward, and the cast caught, swirling out in a full circle once, like a whip, then exploding to fill the room with a bright red essence that spun and swirled like smoke, though Valerie knew it wasn’t smoke.

  What it was she hadn’t the foggiest idea, but it wasn’t smoke.

  The man with the knife staggered and fell, clutching at his head, and ingredients and papers all around Valerie caught flame, burning orange like any wood fire she’d ever seen. Two other scientists tipped against benches then fell, and Valerie blinked.

  It wasn’t much, but it was progress, that blink. The phoenix glowed.

  She tried to flex her fingers as the red essence in the room thickened, and things began to burn more wildly. The woman screamed.

  Valerie hoped she hadn’t killed them.

  Maybe that was the only way to kill an idea, but it hadn’t been her intent.

  The last man standing looked around, then started toward Valerie, hand out and mouth attempting to form words, though Valerie’s cast seemed like it might fully prevent them.

  As she watched, frozen and still, undefended, his eyes went wide and he turned his head vaguely to the side, then collapsed to the floor, no longer held by magic. Valerie could actually feel the energy go out of him, then her spell dropped its intensity and went searching for other targets.

  The man was dead.

  She’d killed him.

  The red swirled thicker, things around Valerie throwing up bigger flames and the three other scientists screaming with their arms over their heads, and Valerie wondered if she hadn’t done something wrong.

  She’d killed a man.

  Entirely unintentionally.

  She was a freak, a menace, a terror. They’d all been right about her at school, right to try to keep magic away from her.

  She was as big a danger as the Pure.

  She had no idea how to stop her magic.

  There were pops and zaps and the lights flickered, and Valerie would have dropped her head if she’d been able, then she met eyes with Ethan.

  He was standing at the entrance to the broader room, his body relaxed, unconcerned, as he watched what was happening there in the lab.

  His arm was out.

  It took her several moments to put it together, but in the grim look on his face, even as he looked her in the eye, she realized it.

  Heard it in his voice in the woods sitting outside of the school.

  He had killed people, before.

  And he had just done it again.

  Defending her.

  He gave her one slow nod, then let his arm fall.

  With a sensation like her ears popping, the magic around her deflated and collapsed, draining first toward the floor and then into Valerie’s cast, until the air was clear and everything was silent, apart from the crackle of burning papers and the moans of the three living scientists.

  It was done.

  Whatever it was, it was done.

  One of the men shifted and tried to stand, and Valerie fought against the immobility of her own body, but the cast was still too strong in her arms and her legs. Her neck was just beginning to thaw.

  Ethan walked carefully across the room, Shack following behind him.

  “I’ve got them,” Shack said, taking something out of his backpack and beginning to cast binding magic on the scientists. It wasn’t Valerie’s prepped cast, but she recognized the work. Ethan dropped to a knee next to her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She blinked.

  Her eyelids were unstuck, and she had some mobility in her ribs, but her face, her arms and legs were like they were made of something other than flesh and bone.

  She looked at him, not knowing for sure what facial expression she’d had when the cast had finally locked down.

  He nodded.

  “Let me see what I can find.”

  She would have nodded back, but… yeah.

  He went to one of the tables and snorted.

  “Everything here is cooked,” he said. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever cast on people who fought back less,” Shack commented to no one in particular.

  Ethan came to kneel next to her again.

  “I’m not sure how to help you,” he said.

  “We just need the person who cast it to let it go,” Shack said. “Go see who has the stuff to make a cast like that, and we’ll convince them.”

  Valerie actually had the words to shut the spell down, now that she was done with the spell that had mattered, she just didn’t have the ability to speak them, and it was beginning to frustrate her more and more as she sat there, stuck. The phoenix was still doing its work, but the wait was excruciating.

  She didn’t like being stuck in her own body, obviously, but the first moments had just been shock and awareness of the things going on around her. As the situation cooled, she fought harder and harder against the cast without any measurable reaction out of her body to show for it.

  Ethan needed to figure it out quickly, or she was going to find a way to hurt herself.

  “Here we go,” Ethan said. “Whose desk is this?”

  “Is there a name on it?” Shack answered.

  “Don’t see one.”

  “What have you done?” a voice asked.

  Male.

  Deep, gravely.

  Out of Valerie’s range of vision.

  It stirred a sense of fear that Valerie hadn’t felt before, something primal, and where before she had felt frustrated and angry, now she felt trapped, like she would have ripped her hands free of her fingers if that would have gotten her up off the floor. The chain on her neck grew hot as the phoenix glowed redder.

  There was a wave of force that tore through the room, and if it weren’t for the fact that Valerie was frozen to the floor, she would have gone tumbling. She saw Shack stumble and fall back toward the wall, and she heard Ethan’s grunt as work tables scraped across the floor. The two scientists Shack had bound slid along the floor, unresisting, and
the third one lay flat as if he were dead.

  “I asked you what have you done?” the voice said again, and there was another push, this time enough to make Valerie’s knees skid across the floor. Shack slammed into the wall.

  “Leave her alone,” Ethan said, and there was another noise, a dull thud and a grunt that Valerie couldn’t be certain what it was, but there were no footsteps after that and Ethan didn’t speak again.

  A third wave of force hit her, and the tables skidded away from her in arcs as her fingers slid along the ground and the scientists rolled out of her field of vision. The creeping line of motion reached her mouth, and Valerie shouted the cast to set herself free.

  “Stand and face your destruction,” the man said.

  Valerie pushed herself to her feet, turning around and putting her hands into the wraps under her clothes, feeling for the toolbox ingredients, the potential of the magic they could do.

  The man was younger than her father, but not by much. Tall, with broad shoulders and thickly-muscled arms, he stood with them crossed at his chest, looking at her with a sour expression.

  “This is your fault,” he said.

  Valerie blinked, looking for Ethan. He was collapsed against the wall, his arms lax in front of his curled knees.

  She couldn’t tell from here, in the moment she had, if he was breathing.

  She looked back at the man.

  “Probably,” she said. “Usually is.”

  “Who are you? Child. You haven’t acted alone. A child could not have done this.”

  Valerie shrugged.

  “Maybe you’re not as good at this thing as you thought you were.”

  The way he talked, he thought he was in charge, but certainly Fact Alexander would have looked older than her father, right? Was there magic to make yourself look younger, if you wanted to?

  Of course there was. If anyone was going to have magic, at some point they were going to figure out how to look young and beautiful forever, if not actually be young and beautiful forever.

  That was obvious.

  “Are you Fact?” she asked.

  The man’s shoulders shook once with a dark laugh.

  “The man is nothing without me.”

  “Ah,” Valerie said. “You’re…” She snapped her fingers, having forgotten the name that Samantha Angelsword had used. “Tristan? Thompson? Tallie?”

  “I am Tridium,” he said. “And I am going to enjoy removing your life from your fragile little body with great deliberation.”

  Ethan shifted.

  She heard it more than she saw it, but it simultaneously reassured her and made her angry.

  He was hurt, and it was this bastard who had done it.

  She was going to hurt him back.

  That just wasn’t negotiable.

  The words came to her unbidden, words of darkness and violence and anger, and the demon laughed at her, swiping at the air with a clawed hand. It was as though his hand could reach her face across the distance, and she stumbled sideways, putting her fingers to her cheek, then redoubling the energy in her cast through means that she couldn’t have put words to other than sheer force of will. Her fingers curled and she ripped her arms across her chest and out, and the demon took a step back, rolling his jaw to the side and considering her for a moment.

  “Feisty,” he said. “I like to break feisty.”

  He put his hands up to either side and everything in the room that wasn’t made of people or ashes lifted, drifting at first and then spinning and whirling. Desks went past her, bumping and tumbling her, and she reached into her reserves of ingredients, taking out an oil and marking her hands with it. At a word it sprung to flame and she sent it at him. The magic, here, was different. Not dark but equally violent, purifying, hot like Valerie had never felt before.

  The demon put his arms up and roared, breaking the flames and charging at her as the tables and the equipment picked up speed. Valerie ducked a table and rolled, trying to keep furniture between her and the demon, the sound of wind and collisions clouding all other noise.

  The demon cast at her, something that felt like a dart through her chest, cutting flesh, and she put her hand to the spot, expecting blood but finding nothing. It dropped her to her knees and he caught up to her, but she managed to scramble away, not able to stand, hardly able to crawl with all of the things flying through the air.

  This wasn’t supposed to be possible.

  This wasn’t supposed to be how it ended.

  This wasn’t supposed to be how any of this went.

  War was supposed to be glorious and exhilarating and full of triumphs.

  The demon cast at her again, and another bolt of pain went through her waist, a harpoon that she couldn’t see or pull out.

  She crawled.

  Everything was dazzling and confusing, nothing she saw made sense, even as she knew that it wouldn’t have made sense under the best of conditions. Her mind was scrambling, away from the demon and away from reality, trying to flee and hide away from everything so that she just wouldn’t have to.

  And then the voice came through.

  “Valerie.”

  She rolled onto her back, pushing away from the demon with her feet, trying to find Sasha.

  Why was Sasha here?

  She shouldn’t be here.

  Tridium would kill her, too.

  Sasha was supposed to be safe, with Hanson.

  “Valerie, don’t die easy.”

  She put her hands to her face, not even knowing what it meant.

  What could it mean?

  The demon was going to kill her.

  Was this about a glorious death?

  Was it a hallucination?

  Why would she hallucinate Sasha’s voice instead of her mother’s?

  The thought of her mother struck her and brought her mind back away from the edge.

  The demon was close enough to be reaching for her foot as she just pressed herself against a wall, waiting.

  Waiting for him to kill her.

  Don’t die easy.

  It was something her mother said.

  She could always fight, if she could fight, and if you could fight, you could win. There was still a chance.

  She needed to flee. If the demon caught hold of her… Her body reacted to it viscerally, the idea of his fingers on her ankle, and she knew she needed to avoid it. It was critical.

  But she needed to fight, too.

  First she needed to stand.

  She pushed her back against the wall, getting her feet under her.

  She searched through the things her fingers could find in her pockets, taking out a piece of wood.

  Her wand.

  She went digging, knowing exactly where the tell-weed was, Sasha’s favorite, and she wound it around the wand in between dodges, trying to get away from the wall.

  Having her back against the wall was good for defending herself when things might come at her from behind, but it wasn’t so useful when lab desks were threatening to crush her there.

  She found a slick of oil at the base of her palm and she called flame to it, drawing the wand across the hot yellow flame so that the tell-weed caught, and she flicked the entire thing at the demon, calling for his head in a language she didn’t know. There was a surge of power that seemed to come from the tips of her fingers, the top of her head, the bottoms of her feet, and the yellow flame scorched across the room.

  He put both hands over his face and everything dropped out of the air. Valerie put her arms over her face as a desk narrowly missed skewering her to the floor, and the demon howled. Wood shattered against walls, and Valerie hoped that Shack and Ethan had been as lucky as she had.

  “Keep going,” the invisible Sasha shouted. “Keep doing it.”

  Valerie got out the vial of oil again - she didn’t remember having put it away, but there it was again, where it should have been - and marked her hand once more, then got out another strand of tell-weed, wrapping the wand. The flame on her
palm rolled high, and she put her hand all the way around the wand, setting light to the tell-weed and flicking it at the demon’s heart.

  The noise he made was…

  There were no words on earth for what that noise was, but it broke Valerie’s will. She fell to the floor with the heels of her hands smashed against her ears, just hoping for it to be over.

  And then there was a shout that Valerie would have heard even if she had gone stone deaf.

  Susan Blake.

  Valerie opened her eyes to find her mother standing at the entrance to the room, her hair wild and her face bloodied, Grant Blake standing to one side of her with a fury to his expression that was the most calming thing Valerie had ever seen.

  On Susan Blake’s other side was the strange, casual man from the trailer at Samantha Angelsword’s house, the one called Jason, only this wasn’t the same man remotely. He held a sword with two hands, down and out, and where Susan and Grant had stopped, Jason was still walking.

  He was terrifying and it made Valerie want to cheer.

  Beside him was a huge blond woman, also with a sword. Valerie had never seen her before, but there was an instinct that she and Jason sort of went together, and you didn’t want to be anywhere near them, if you were on the wrong side.

  As Valerie pushed her back against a table that had fallen on its side, she watched as her mother and father went and marked the walls, and Jason and the blond woman split to take opposite sides of the demon, going over tables as though they were part of the normal landscape.

  “You will lose,” the demon said. “Things are too far along for you to be able to stop them.”

  “Not my problem,” Jason said. “I’m just a soldier, man. I’m here to ash you because she told me to come do it.”

  He looked back, and Valerie’s mom nodded as Grant Blake dragged Shack out of the room. Valerie tried to point her mom at where Ethan had last been, but her arms didn’t seem to be cooperating anymore.

  She watched with a lethal sense of anticipation as Jason and the blond woman took positions on either side of the demon, and Tridium roared again, going after the blond woman with fire from his hands.

  “Been with the mages too long,” the woman said, stepping to the side and putting the point of her sword to the side of his neck. “You’ve forgotten how to fight like a demon.”