Dajia rushed forward. Several regulators moved to stop her, to get between her and Eli, but he held up a hand to calm them. She gripped his arms and stared at him, frightened.
“You’re afraid,” she said softly, pitching her voice so low he had to bend forward to hear. “You hide it well. I think I’m the only one who can see it.”
“I’ll never be able to hide anything from you, will I?”
She gritted her teeth and clutched his sleeves. “This is suicide. If you go out there, we won’t have a future together for you to hide anything from me.”
Eli felt the corner of his lips quirk. He slipped one arm from her grasp and traced his knuckles over her cheek. “You smell good. Like… apples.”
Dajia flushed. “Stop looking at me like you want to eat me.”
Eli laughed at this and cupped her cheek. “Maybe you shouldn’t smell so delicious.”
“Eli.” The way she said his name, so pleading, so sweet, nearly broke his heart.
“Yesterday was one of the worst days of my life,” Eli said. “The sector is crumbling all around me. But then you showed up.” He leaned closer, putting his lips to her ear. “My world right now, outside the death and chaos, is all you, Dajia Bray. When this is over, we have a future to plan. We will have a future.”
And he kissed her, there in front of his men. He splayed his hands over the small of her back, tucking her securely against him as his tongue teased hers. He trailed his lips over her cheek, to her neck, and paused by her ear once more. “I can’t wait to taste you again.”
Dajia’s breath caught audibly in her throat. The heat between them deepened into a desperate, liquid need.
Eli kissed her one more time and wished he could throw it all away. Stay with her. Run away with her.
But the future he had just promised her relied on clean water and a protective dome. One crisis at a time, he’d fix their world so that he could spend the rest of her life making her smile.
He touched her face, then turned his back and left.
26
Dajia
He was gone.
She didn’t have time to coach him, to tell him about masking their scent or magicking their weapons or throwing fire to consume the ravagers.
“They’re walking to their death,” Dajia murmured.
Cora drew up beside her now that the regulators were gone. “They’re cops, but they’re witches, too. Right? They know what they’re doing.”
“No, they don’t. The regent trained them as muscle, not witches. They don’t know anything about using magick against ravagers. They’ve been told it doesn’t work.”
Cora’s mouth hung open inelegantly. “Why?”
“Because the regent is a piece of shit.”
They fell into silence as they stayed firmly rooted in the courtyard, waiting for their friends to appear. To his credit, Regulator Boyle made their exit a swift and painless one, wishing Dajia, “Good day, Miss,” before he took off in the direction the search party had taken.
Dajia eyed her newly-formed coven for any signs of abuse. “Are you guys okay?”
Liam grinned. “Dude, that was awesome. We were arrested.”
Dajia rolled her eyes. “You could have been killed, Liam. Your dad is going to murder me.”
“Nah. It’s my mom you have to worry about.” His grin widened.
“This,” Dajia told Cora, gesturing at Liam’s snarky face, at a loss for expressing her frustration.
Cora smiled. “I have a few more years before mine will reach this obstinate age.”
“But seriously, you’re all okay?” Dajia addressed the rest of them.
Jove spoke up, his eyes flashing in his dark face. “Thank you for your concern. We were unharmed, though the place where they held us was a nightmare.”
“The dungeons,” one of Liam’s friends offered.
“You shouldn’t have enjoyed your stay,” Dajia admonished. “Holy Hades, you guys, they could have executed you as a danger to the regent!”
“We are a danger to the regent,” a mild-mannered witch named Sheila said.
Cora laughed. “She’s not wrong.”
“I’m glad you’re all okay. But we don’t have much time,” Dajia said, redirecting the conversation. What monster had she created? “I need a couple volunteers to go with me. A team of regulators is headed to the wasteland on a damn suicide mission. We need to follow them.”
Jove quirked his thick brow. He had the kind of expressive face once immortalized in graphic novels. “You really think a bunch of untrained witches can do what regulators can’t?”
“The regulators aren’t trained in magick any more than we are,” Dajia told him. She gave them a quick rundown of what Eli had told her the night before. “If they go out there without magick in their arsenal, they’re going to be massacred.”
“We’ll go!” Liam offered. His three pals nodded excitedly.
“Absolutely not,” Dajia snapped. “I let you get away with running into a breach of ravagers, and I’m thankful you’re not dead. But you’re not going into the wastelands or beyond the dome. I’ll chain you to the steps of the palace.”
She turned away from his pout and looked at Jove, Sheila, and the rest of the adults. “Volunteers?”
All hands raised. Dajia took a moment to look into each of their eyes, to think their name and offer a small incantation of protection.
“You realized how dangerous this is?”
Solemn nods answered her question, but not a one of them looked anything but determined.
Dajia took Cora’s hands. “Your boys—”
“—are safe and sound with their dad,” Cora finished, squeezing her fingers. “I’m with you, Day.”
It was the first time she’d heard the nickname since she’d said goodbye to her mother. An hour ago? Two? Had so little time passed? It felt like a lifetime.
Dajia let go of Cora’s hand. “Here’s the plan—”
Dajia’s words were cut off by a keening from inside the palace. An awful sound, inhuman with despair.
A sharp wind cut through her, throwing her hair back from her face. The breeze smelled of fresh sea, salt, and death.
High above them, the protective dome of the regent’s power began to fail.
27
Dajia
Time slowed.
Dajia stared at the blue sky above them, amazed at how crystal clear it was. She’d never noticed before how the regent’s magick had tinted it to a color less-than-spectacular. It was a metaphor for his reign of terror on Sector 14.
A reign now over, it seemed.
His golden magick broke away from the apex of the dome little by little. Each section flared like a match seeking oxygen, and then blipped out, revealing more blue sky.
“We’re in trouble,” Cora said, her own gaze on the dome. “And the heir regent just left. We’re on our own.”
“We’ve always been on our own,” Dajia corrected her. “We just didn’t know it.”
“What do we do?” Jove asked.
For the first time, Liam looked afraid. “Pray?”
“No.” Dajia went for her stern teacher voice, the tone she used when her kids were unruly in class. It was the voice that got attention and made it clear who was in charge. “I mean, pray if you want, because words are powerful, but I have a better idea.”
CHAOS REIGNED INSIDE THE PALACE.
Not that she’d expected anything different. The heir regent and a dozen of his strongest men and women left on a suicide mission in the moments before the regent died. If Dajia wasn’t absolutely certain she could fix the dome, she might have been sobbing in a corner, too.
She couldn’t let the fear in. She couldn’t worry about Eli, though he was never far from her mind. She couldn’t think of the survivors waiting breathlessly for the dome to fail entirely, of the terror in knowing death would come. She knew the ravagers were there, waiting, like they had been for a week.
Her fingertips tingled as she
led her coven down the mirrored grand hallway. “Where are the dungeons?” she asked Jove.
Without prompting, he took the lead.
They walked a spiral stone staircase for what seemed months. Dajia tried not to think of the failing dome—how close had it come to the ground by now? She hastened her steps, pressed forward in a race against time she couldn’t see.
Jove stepped onto a landing. “Here. This is where we were.”
Dajia stared at the staircase. Steps descended further into darkness.
“Not here,” Dajia murmured, the vibration in her fingers strengthening. The stars said to keep going.
So she did.
Deep in the bowels of the earth, so far down the manufactured walls felt more like a cave, the staircase ended on a dusty floor. Dajia wasted no time, settling into a brisk jog. The tunnel twisted and turned, but no other halls bisected it. There was only one way to go, and they went.
Dajia panted from the effort by the time she stopped before a tall wooden door beset with metal studs and grime. It was the most forbidding entrance she’d ever seen, and every part of her screamed to turn and run.
She didn’t have that luxury.
She lifted her wand. “Aperio!”
On another day, magick had barreled through her front door and taken everything from her. The memory settled into her skin as this door burst open beneath her wand. A boiling anger made worse by the scene on the other side.
“It’s true,” Cora said, her voice catching. She fell to her knees on the dirty floor, clutching her wand as if it could keep her from drowning.
Eli had told her, but Dajia hadn’t grasped the full extent of the horror. All twelve cages held an unmoving form. High above, the shattered black crystal of the regent’s wand smoked.
It had died with him.
“Everybody pick a cage,” Dajia said, heading for the ladder on the wall.
“Are you crazy?” Sheila asked, appalled.
“Check them for a pulse,” Dajia said calmly. “If they’re alive, be careful and remove them. If they’re dead, well, I guess you don’t need to be careful but remove them anyway.”
“What is this place?” Jove asked, horror in his baritone.
“Hell,” Dajia answered simply. And she began to climb.
Cora was the first to jump into action. Dajia heard the zap of her wand as she unlocked the cage, and she exclaimed in a shaky voice, “He’s alive, but he’s really hurt.”
“Dead,” Sheila said a moment later, tears in her voice. “For a while, I think. May the gods bless his journey.”
Dajia continued to climb, listening to her friends communicate as they reached their cages and attended to the forms within. She counted only five still alive, though none of them conscious.
The ladder crested about twenty feet off the ground. From there, a slim, creaky walkway inched across the open space, out to where the regent’s wand smoked in the knot of iron where the cages met.
The metal beneath her hands was cold and moist. Dajia gripped tightly, starting the journey across the room on her hands and knees. She took one careful hand forward at a time, keeping the toes of her boots inside the walkway, nudged up against the thin lip that separated her body from an open fall.
“What’s the plan, Day?” Cora called. From so high up, she sounded small.
Sweat dripped down Dajia’s face despite the cool damp of the cave. “The regent used this to draw power from people unwillingly. He stripped them of their magick and used it to strengthen himself.”
“And what are we doing here?” Jove asked.
“We are going to use this contraption to willingly combine our powers and knit the dome.” Dajia slid forward another few inches, her legs wobbling from the effort. The hard iron bruised her knees and soaked through her blue jeans.
“That’s genius!” Cora called with excitement.
“No, it’s not. It’s common sense. Now shut up and get in your cages!”
A smattering of laughter below widened Dajia’s smile and gave her the strength to keep moving.
Where the cages met, the soldered metal offered a more solid sitting area. Dajia swung a leg over one rod, and her other over another, and inched forward the last of the way on her butt.
She grimaced at the smoking wand nestled between her knees. She didn’t want to touch it, as if the regent’s mania was contagious. Small fissures decorated the black stone; it was likely one good beating away from a total demolition.
Dajia glanced around. She used the sleeve of her shirt to wipe the condensation off the metal behind her. Gripping the rods with both hands to steady herself, Dajia lifted a boot and slammed it down on the crystal.
It splintered on impact. Black magick, thick and viscous, spiraled into the air with a tiny whoomp, throwing Dajia onto her back. Tiny pieces of the regent’s wand rained on the grimy, blood-stained floor below.
Her ears rang in the aftermath. She thought she heard cheering below her, and a muffled, “Have fun in hell, asshole!” but she couldn’t be too sure over the din.
She righted herself and twined her legs back around the bars. Finally, a voice broke through the whooshing in her ears. “Are you okay, Dajia?”
Jove’s deep accent.
She held up a thumb in the universal Everything’s okay signal. “Are you guys ready?”
“What are we doing?” Cora asked.
“Fuck if I know!” Dajia laughed, sure her voice was way too loud but too giddy to care. She felt like she was flying, high above the floor where the last remnants of the dictator had stopped smoking. She spread her arms like wings. “I’ve never done this before. Have you?”
Her covenmates had taken up residence in each cage. But the before and after were different; now, the doors were open, and the witches inside were upright and smiling, joining in Dajia’s mirth over their complete lack of experience. Dajia felt their connection to her not through the metal underneath her, but inside of her. Many of them had only met that morning, but they had come together so securely. They shared a common thread—not just the common background where their magick had been forgotten, but a common desire to protect their home better than the regent ever had.
“In the new Sector 14,” Dajia called, “coven-work will be a normal part of life.”
“Hear, hear!” Cora called. Liam and his friends hooted, and general agreement drifted to her ears as her hearing returned.
“There will be no more separation of the magickal and the non-magickal!” Dajia shoved her wand into the space where the cages met, replacing the hole left behind by the regent’s black obsidian with her father’s rose quartz. “Sector 14 will thrive together, a cohesive whole.”
More cheers filled the room. To her surprise, two of the former captives had awakened; they clapped weakly and hollered at her words. The sight brought her comfort; she couldn’t bring back the people the regent had already killed, but she could right the wrongs he’d left behind.
A soft, light soprano drifted through the room. Sheila, lifting her wand with a glowing tip. “Sometimes in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow.”
Cora joined in with a raspy singsong, their voices melding together. “But if we are wise, we know that there’s always tomorrow.”
Goose bumps spread over Dajia’s body. She recalled Myra’s decree to live, to take the sector into the future: “And do it with a song in your heart.”
Jove’s deep baritone jumped in. “Lean on me, when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend. I’ll help you carry on. For it won’t be long, ’til I’m gonna need, somebody to lean on.”
One by one as he carried the chorus, her coven jumped into the words. Their voices became one in song. They swayed on their feet, wands aflame. Liam and the other teenagers picked up the beat, adding percussion to lyrics they weren’t familiar with, a song that predated Dajia, the Reckoning, and beyond.
“Please swallow your pride, if I have faith you need to borrow,” Dajia sang, closing her eyes and
joining the waves of magick they raised. “For no one can fill those of your needs that you won’t let show.”
Jove stomped his feet and clapped his hands, raising his voice over the rest, “You just call on me brother, when you need a hand.”
The coven chorused as one, “We all need somebody to lean on.”
“I just might have a problem, that you’d understand,” Cora called, picking up the lead as effortlessly as a bird flying.
Jove’s baritone returned to the single diamond bell of the coven: “We all need somebody to lean on.”
It was beautiful. Dajia had never seen something so magnificent in all her life. The song was a dance, a magickal waltz where they all had a part, but they all shared the spotlight. It was no longer music. It was an incantation.
Power built in the cage. Her friends continued dancing, smiling and singing. “Lean on me when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on.”
Dajia leaned forward to touch her father’s wand. She closed her eyes. “For it won’t be long, ’til I’m gonna need, somebody to lean on.”
The last note carried on its own. Every single voice leveled to a clear, lyrical melody of magick and strength.
Dajia’s wand flooded the room with light. No longer pink, the remnants of her father’s soul contained in a tiny rose quartz. White light swirled with the might and fury of her coven.
The light shot upwards with the speed of a geyser and disappeared.
Dajia drew a breath, gripping the metal with a woozy kind of giddiness. She could feel the dome settling into place outside.
“We did it!” Dajia called, goose flesh covering her body. “We did it!”
28
Eli
Eli knew the wastelands existed: a space between the physical walls and the dome of magick that protected the sector. Sector 14 had once occupied the space, back before the regent began to waste away and his power could fuel a much larger land area. Between that and the declining population, it had made more sense to draw the walls in.
The Shadows and Sorcery Collection Page 53