Wild Magic Book One, page 22
“I can’t believe he is relying on you. What a fool. William has really lost his touch.” Her voice twisted on the word touch like she had personal experience with it.
“I’m not gonna let you take Sally,” I said, the most feeble, stupid words of my life. She had Sally. The warden downed me in a single attack, and the most I could do was spit blood in her face.
“Everything has its uses.” She lifted me up by the collar, grabbing me like I weighed nothing – not even a feather, just like air. As my feet dangled, my hands jerked up, and I grabbed her fingers but couldn’t move them, not a centimeter.
She lurched toward the edge of the bridge. She’d throw me off, and I’d brain myself on one of the jagged rocks. The water would pull me down to the main river in Fairbridge, and I’d wash up on the shore somewhere. William would glance at my corpse once and walk away.
She lifted me right over the railings and let me dangle down against the bridge’s side, kicking legs scrabbling against the stone. Out of the corner of my vision, I saw Sally, eyes wide with tears. She tried to scream at me, but I couldn’t hear her voice. It felt like struggling to hear someone in a bubble.
“Everything has its uses,” the warden repeated, “even you.”
“What—” I choked between her squeezing fingers.
“What will I use you for? Simple. I will use your bloody, dead body to hammer my message home to William one last time. He has no chance if he fights me. None at all.” All her focus zeroed in on one word. If. Her lips trembled as she ripped it out of the air. It suggested William could stop fighting. So could I. Because now I would die.
She went to drop me. Her fingers twitched and released, but her phone rang.
Wardens had cellphones?
I doubted it came from the spirit realm.
Her lips twitched. She stared into my eyes and narrowed them. I don’t know why she didn’t drop me, but she sank a hand into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She answered in a smooth movement and pressed it against her ear. “What?”
Scrabbling desperately, trying not to choke on her oppressive grip, I strained to hear the voice on the other end. I couldn’t. But I watched the effect it had on the warden’s face. She stiffened from her chin first up to her brow in a wave of anger like someone concreted her. She swore. “Fine,” she grunted at the phone.
She slid her thumb over the end-call button, then pocketed it.
She dangled me, enjoying the moment, especially when I screamed around her grip. Then she yanked me back over the bridge and threw me onto it.
I fell hard, and something tumbled out of my pocket.
I watched it roll and touch her boot.
The pill from John. I’d forgotten about it. The syringe was more important.
The warden tilted her head down, framed by her tumbling blond locks, then leaned onto one knee and grabbed the pill. She rolled it around in her thumb and index finger and smiled. “How convenient.”
My eyes exploded wide. I knew what she’d do and knew I couldn’t escape this time.
She lurched toward me and grabbed my chin. I tried to scratch her hands, but my nails didn’t even indent the flesh. She forced my mouth open and jammed the pill through my lips with a rough jerk of her thumb.
I didn’t want to swallow. I couldn’t stop myself. She stabbed magic into my mouth and forced the pill down my gullet.
I thrashed, trying to punch her face, but it wouldn’t work.
The pill hit my bloodstream. Instantly. It dissolved before it even struck my stomach.
I flopped like John after I injected him.
My body felt like a deboned fish. I teetered to the side, then crumpled onto my hip. My head struck the bridge. My eyes blinked languidly until they couldn’t work anymore and started to close. I felt my magic leaving me.
And I saw the warden’s hand reaching for my throat.
When I blacked out, she’d either kill me or take me someplace terrifying. She would eventually kill me – she’d just follow through with whatever order she’d received first.
This was it. The point of no return. I reached it and couldn’t force my way through.
… But I could force my way back.
I didn’t know what this bridge was or what kind of threshold it made between the mansion and the rest of the world, but I knew safety was just behind me. The grounds started where the bridge stopped. If I could only get to them, they would save me. I’d never been more certain of a fact in my life. I could recall – in perfect detail – how the sitting room door opened and let me out. How the mansion decided to trust me. I just needed to trust it once more. Just needed to roll. Just needed to practice magic – the last I’d ever manage.
As the warden’s fingers went to clutch my throat, I kicked her on the knee.
I didn’t try to overpower her and didn’t need to.
I just had to get back to the grounds.
As I kicked her, I forced my magic to rise. It felt like lifting the whole world, like Atlas, crumbling from years of overwork, shouldering the sky up one last time.
I screamed, as pathetic as some dying bird falling from the clouds, but the cry still pulsed out, dragging my magic with me. Its yellow tendrils of force scooped me up, wrapped me in its embrace, and pulled me backward just before the warden grabbed me.
I rolled three times and struck the mansion grounds as the warden shrieked.
She sounded like someone slapped her with fire. She lurched over, but she couldn’t get to me in time. Her fingers struck some invisible barrier right at the threshold of the bridge. It forced her hand back like someone tethered it to a shuttle and fired it into outer space.
“No,” she cried again.
But it was too late. She couldn’t get to me. I was… safe.
No. I was alive. When I woke, my world would crumble completely, and I’d never put it back together.
Chapter 18
I woke. I wanted to be in the drawing room, to be embraced by that couch, and if I couldn’t, certain arms would do—
But as I resurfaced through the sludge of unconsciousness, the sound of clinical beeps rang in my ears.
I saw a bank of medical equipment beside me, felt the cuff of a blood pressure monitor around my left arm, and the squeeze of an oxy monitor around my finger.
Electrodes covered my chest, and some kind of monitor was strapped around my head, my messy hair rumpled around it. As soon as it registered consciousness, it beeped in a shrill tone that could grab anyone’s attention.
“She’s awake,” someone said with clipped clinical efficiency. Then I heard their heels twisting as they walked out of the room.
Someone walked into view as my light-sensitive eyes adjusted to the bright neon glow above me. I heard them first – then felt the thump, thump, thump of their heavy footsteps.
My back arched, heart beating harder. “William,” I said long before I could see him.
He said nothing. He took one last step up to my bedside, hands in his pockets.
I stared at his face for what felt like an hour until I finally saw his features. They resolved out of the blurry background of the room like a hand out of the darkness.
Speaking of my hand, it twitched toward him until it stopped and dropped.
William stared at me with the kind of disappointment I’d seen only once.
This wasn’t the look he shot me after the incident in the spirit realm. He’d used this expression on the warden.
It was the gaze he gave you when you betrayed him one last time.
His eyes were hooded, his cheeks so stiff they couldn’t move, his jaw locked like a vice.
“What… what happened? The warden—” I remembered Sally. I tried to sit up. I couldn’t. A storm raged in my head like someone shoved a tornado up my nostrils.
Searing pain bounced through me, and I gasped. William did nothing.
“Why?” he asked in a voice I couldn’t track. Emotion surged through it, but his vampiric control squashed it.
“What? I… I heard Sally screaming. I had to go to her.”
“Why did you take the pill?”
“Pill?” I recalled the pill. That must be why pain filled me. “I didn’t take a pill. The warden fed it to me. The warden got through your defenses. She’s attached to that bridge somehow. I heard Sally screaming. I got out of the sitting room. I headed down to the bridge. She was trapped. The warden fought me. She gave me that pill, whatever it is—”
“It was C9R, Lillian, and stop lying,” he said with a voice like a cold slap.
The whole room resolved now.
I didn’t care about the details, about the plain white walls, the small window, and the cold blue-tinted lighting. I cared about William, that I couldn’t see his hands. He pinned them behind his back, but from the tension clasping his shoulders, he clenched them into the tightest fists he could.
“William,” I said through a rough breath, “I didn’t take C9R—”
“I don’t know where you got it from – if you took it from John in the mine or if you got it earlier. But why did you take it, Lillian? Why—” Either his emotions got too much for him, or something else did. He turned hard on his foot.
I reached out and grabbed his sleeve. He let me hold it – for two seconds. Then he used a grain of his vampire strength to pull his arm back. He took a determined step away from me that felt like the last he’d ever take, like after today, we’d never meet again. What would be the point?
I didn’t have magic anymore.
I… I didn’t have magic anymore.
I lifted my hand too fast, and the oxy monitor slipped off my finger. It tumbled onto the bed, a low, continuous beep issuing from the wall unit beside me. I ignored it and stared at my hands desperately, reminiscent of what I’d done this morning. But no matter how hard I tried to look inside, I couldn’t find the magic that no longer existed.
I gasped in pain purer than any I’d felt. This was existential and achingly complete. It felt like someone gouged something out of my soul.
William took another step away. “Our contract is defunct. You will not have anything to do with the Enforcement Office. As,” I heard him slide his jaw from left to right, “a thank you for your short service, you will not be charged. Good day, Lillian.” He strode to the door.
I blubbered. “Where did my magic go? William—”
“Congratulations. You removed your responsibility and magic in one hit.” He walked out.
I knew he would never return again.
It was over. We were done.
And so was my magic.
Tears rolled through me like wildfire down a dry hill. They burnt through every fact I gave them, promising me this was it. My world was dust at my feet.
The warden gave me C9R – William didn’t believe me. My magic wouldn’t return… and I’d never get the power to save Sally.
I crumpled forward, holding onto my knees, sobbing uncontrollably. Doctors came. Doctors went. Someone offered me a sedative. I didn’t take it.
I couldn’t dull this emotional pain – knew even with a sedative, all I’d do was delay it.
Sally… I’d lost her.
I’d lost William—
I yanked my head to the side, burying my tear-struck face against the pillow.
What was the point? I’d never meet him again. I’d never stop the warden. I’d never visit the spirit realm.
It was over.
As those words repeated in my head, I allowed myself to slip into sleep. It took an hour to work. I kept resurfacing and reliving my emotional pain, punch after punch. But eventually darkness descended.
It swept me into a dream.
I knew it was a dream – or some distant part of my mind did.
I fell into a Gothic mansion, not unlike William’s, but colder, darker, and never-ending. I faced those doors lined up into eternity and ran through them, scrambling through the rooms, searching for someone. I screamed at the top of my lungs, but I couldn’t hear whose name I called. I couldn’t even hear my own breath or footsteps. Room after room, I searched. Room after room, I failed.
And room after room, something crept up behind me. I heard scratching, scrabbling claws, and hissing breath.
I turned wildly over my shoulder, loose hair playing around my face, to glimpse red eyes. Stalkers crept out of the room's corners, broke through the ornate windows, and clambered out of the floor. They chased me.
Right at the end of the corridor, when I finally reached the last room, I burst in. I almost saw someone sitting at a desk, covered in magic, indistinct hand outstretched toward me, but the stalkers caught me and sank their fangs into my neck.
I woke screaming.
And I awoke with the immediate knowledge of what happened. I didn’t need to remember. The cold facts sank through my bones like acid.
For the next hour, as the horror of that dream and my lost magic ate me alive, I fought with my emotions until I finally distracted myself with the TV. I turned it on, shoulders hunched, eyes still blurry.
I flicked through everything until I reached the news.
I saw a pretty anchor with a bright blond bob talking about a new disappearance.
I focused on it like I couldn’t focus on anything else. I was emotionally broken, physically weak, and so distracted by my thoughts, I shouldn’t sustain outward attention for more than a second, but as soon as I heard disappearance, I scooted to the bed’s edge.
I held a shivering breath in my chest and couldn’t let go.
“Mirabella Whitting disappeared on her way to work this morning,” the anchor informed the camera.
A picture of Mirabella appeared on the screen. I immediately recognized her.
I just had to imagine a white lab coat over the black winter coat she wore in the picture, and I knew I’d seen her at Talent Labs. She was one of the numerous scientists who’d worked near the sequencer.
“What the…?”
The anchor continued. Mirabella apparently disappeared in a car park close to where she lived. She picked up some coffee. She walked back to her car. Then no one saw her again. The anchor questioned how this could keep happening and who would be next.
“Someone else from Talent Labs,” I whispered, tone quick.
I wasn’t privy to every detail of this case, but Talent Labs now stuck out like a sore thumb someone hit enough times it was a bloody pulp.
Jenny Thatcher worked at Talent Labs. Max worked at Talent Labs – not that he’d disappeared, but that didn’t matter. He was still connected to the case. He’d given Jenny Thatcher something called C9R Omega.
I didn’t know anything about the other victims, but I did know this. The guy who owned that Tudor house had worked at Talent Labs. Now I raked through the dust of my memory, I recalled Sally mentioned it in passing.
The guy had worked at Talent Labs before snapping and becoming a hoarder until he disappeared mysteriously. He was connected to the case, I just knew it. Now Mirabella had disappeared too.
“This has something to do with Talent Labs. They work on magic – I saw it in the frigging labs when it came for me.”
I spoke out loud. My door was closed, and no one could hear me.
I got out of bed. I wasn’t in a critical condition, and nothing much monitored me. I pulled off my blood pressure cuff and dumped it on my sheets.
Then I walked over to the TV, locked a hand on the perfect plaster wall, tilted my head up, and stared at it.
I was just tall enough to angle it down.
When the anchorwoman moved on to the next piece of news, I turned the TV off.
I just needed to find out what they were working on at Talent Labs. Then—
Then what? That defeated voice rose in my head. It invited me back into the arms of despair. I’d wallowed in it for hours and done a great job.
As I palpated my cheeks, I felt how ruddy they were, how drained and puffy my skin was from my emotional onslaught.
I didn’t care. I dropped my hand. I teetered on a point where I could throw myself back into despair, or I could turn and do something.
What?
I didn’t need to lift my hand again to realize I didn’t have any magic. It felt like someone scoured it from my soul with a scalpel. Then they burnt the remains and turned them to dust.
I couldn’t tell you what I felt now it was gone. This tiny voice said yippee. I didn’t have to work for William anymore. I didn’t have any responsibility. But I could drown that voice out easily – hell, I could crush it with a memory so heavy, it would never rise. What memory? The look William shot me when he told me I was free of magic and responsibility and we’d have nothing to do with each other ever again.
I locked a hand on my stomach as it twitched in regret and closed my eyes then opened them again and stared at the TV. “Talent Labs,” I muttered aloud. “I just have to go there—”
I shook my head. I’d never get into the Labs. I didn’t work for the police anymore. I could remember the security, the super-high fences, the cameras. Hell, I could also recall Arnold’s cold gaze. I didn’t know what had transpired with Max. Maybe he snapped. Perhaps someone pushed him. If anyone had pushed him – it would be Arnold. I could recall him fighting with Jacob over titles. Even before then, he’d reeked of someone who needed to be in charge and hated anyone stepping on his toes.
I didn’t know what the labs did, but I could tell you that if John worked for them, they likely researched C9R or some similar drug.
Maybe they worked on C9R Omega – and that’s how Max got his hands on it. Maybe Max funneled the drug to Jenny, then Arnold found out, murdered her, and pinned it on Max.
My mind spun, and I quickly recalled how Jacob stared at me, smiled, and told me my cop senses were emerging.
I just hoped he was right.
I could return to Talent Labs, but they’d never let me in. Or I could get the identity of the Tudor place’s owner and head to his family. It was a real long shot, but maybe they’d kept some of his work.
I clutched hold of hope. Just a scrap, a tiny fragment like a preciously small baby bird that fell from a nest right at your feet. With the right care, maybe it would grow and fly one day.
