Witch-Mage Liberation, page 15
Brandon’s heart hammered. Thea’s second form disappearing meant she was deep inside the Lake realm. Hopefully, she had found Arthur and was freeing him. All he could do was wait.
He hated waiting. He hated that he could not help her. That’s what Kira is here for, he reminded himself. Even Mother Folsom knew about the extra-dimensional entity and understood Thea needed Kira. That or she was waiting for a time when she could hold the knowledge over Thea’s head.
Brandon had no more time to consider these things because, once again, the house changed. Maybe only the room he was in, but that was enough cause for concern. First, it began to shrink. The walls moved toward one another. Staying here would mean death by wall-crushing.
A groaning sound emitted from the walls as if several beings were trapped within them, and they retreated to where they’d come.
Brandon felt something drip onto his head and peered at the ceiling. He gasped at the pool of black ooze forming around a chandelier and spreading rapidly. He stumbled toward the door to escape the blackness dripping onto the floor. The rate it was spreading meant he could not avoid it for long, though.
He realized then what the mage inside the astral realm was attempting to do. He wanted Brandon to leave Thea’s body here and make her more vulnerable to his attacks. No way in hell would Brandon do that.
The opposite wall, bare except for a window, also changed. A mirror replaced the window, then multiplied until several mirrors filled the wall.
They broke with a sudden shattering of glass. In their place were gaping doorways of darkness. Figures like those Brandon had battled on the floor below emerged. Shadowy apparitions. Not again. These were not so distinct as the servants he’d previously fought. Their features were distorted, ugly, and at odd proportions. Too-big eyes, missing noses, abnormally long limbs, and toothless mouths. A cackling filled the room, and the shadows surrounded him, creating a circle to—
Well, it didn’t matter what the hell they planned. Brandon Cole was trapped.
The shadows moved, culminating and multiplying until Brandon only saw darkness. His body grew heavy, his bones weak. He gripped his gun but could barely feel it. His fingers had gone numb.
Distantly, he heard running footsteps and shouts. A beam of light cut into the room all the way across to where the mirrors had been. Brandon leaped out of the way in time. Mother Folsom stepped through the shadows, surrounded by her shield of crackling purple magic. Behind her were the other three witches, also encased in magic. Jax came last, firing as soon as he was through the doorway.
Magic blasted through the room and tore shadows apart. Screams filled the air. They were inhuman and loud enough to leave Brandon’s ears ringing. He leaped into the fray, firing bullets like Jax was. However, the witches did the real work. While the firearms did little to harm the creatures, they kept them distracted long enough for the witches to weave webs of magic that cut through the shadows, reducing them to ash.
The shadows dissipated. Brandon staggered through the room, weak but gradually regaining strength and clarity now that the magic-infused beings were gone. A new sight lay before him. Thea’s eyes were open. Her astral form had returned to her body, and she wasn’t alone. Clutching her hand as he lay gasping on the floor, eyes wide, was Arthur Adderget.
She did it, Brandon realized. The vacant, hollow look in her eyes told him the task had not been easy. A pit formed in his stomach. This fight was far from over. Getting Arthur back had only been the beginning.
He met Thea’s eyes as he bent in front of her. “Are you okay?”
Thea tried to muster words but couldn’t. Tears came to her eyes. Finally, she managed, “He vanished. He’s gone to destroy the whole city.”
They were the last words Thea heard before she came back to her body.
Silas’ deep, cold voice, telling her she could have Arthur and could play her little witch games all she wanted. He’d be back for her, the perfect sacrifice. Until then, the city was his.
Brandon helped her to her feet. She wobbled and leaned against him. Jax’s grim gaze met hers, and he gave her the barest nod, acknowledging that she’d performed a difficult feat. Difficult or not, things had only gotten worse.
Thea was distracted by her coven Mother, who dropped to her knees at Arthur’s side, relief and pain contorting her countenance. Arthur clutched her hand, rasping words no one could understand. “He needs water,” Thea croaked. She did, too.
Jax drew a water bottle from his tactical backpack, offering it to the skinchanger first, then Thea. She finished drinking and quickly surveyed Arthur’s wounds. He appeared more badly beaten in the physical realm than in the astral one. Every exposed portion of skin was scraped, cut, or bruised. He bore a black eye and a split lip.
Mother Folsom began administering healing magic to him, but Arthur stopped her.
“Sssilasss isss coming back for usss. We mussst leave.”
“He’s right,” Thea spoke up. “We have to leave this house as soon as possible.”
The trick to reaching the first floor wasn’t about fending off more shadowy apparitions and statues coming alive but navigating the ever-changing house. They found the ceiling, walls, and floor rotating in the main hallway. They had to move quickly down the hall to avoid being caught up in the rotation, spun endlessly without a way to escape.
Eventually, they came to a non-moving portion of the hallway, though the ceiling was a wall with several picture frames dangling from it and a chandelier stuck out of the floor. The stairs to the first floor were another problem, however. They didn’t exist anymore. In their place was a wave of carpeting that ebbed and flowed. The floor was twenty or so feet below them.
A funhouse from Hell, Thea thought. “We’ll have to jump and hope we don’t break our backs,” she told her companions. “We’ll use our shields to break the fall.” She signaled the coven witches, who encased Brandon and Jax in their magic so they could jump. They sent Arthur down, then Mother Folsom leaped off the landing. The other three coven witches followed, leaving Thea the last to stand there.
A hissing sound behind her made her turn.
“Thea, are you coming?” Brandon shouted from below.
Kira jolted in the satchel. Thea, go!
Shadows flowed into the hallway behind them, but not so distinct as the former beings had been. A wall of blackness rose, filling the space between the floor and ceiling, the right and left walls. It grew, pressing hard enough against all four sides that the walls cracked. From inside those shadows came arms longer than Thea’s body with hands the size of her torso and nails the length of her face, dripping with dusty blackness.
She froze, then a spurt of magic like a small electric shock from Kira had Thea flinging out her shield. She took a running jump off the carpet-wave stairs. As soon as her feet left the floor, the shadows lurched at her shield. She felt nails rake across her magic. She cried out as if it had been her shirt and back, not her shield. The hands grabbed her shoulders and jerked her back.
Thea struggled, screaming. Her shield flared around her again, but it did nothing.
“Help her!” Brandon screamed from below.
Mother Folsom grunted. “I’m trying to heal Ar—”
“We’re going to lose her!” Jax bellowed.
A surge of purple, green, and blue magic flew past Thea’s head. With an explosion of colors, magic, and shadows behind her, she flew past the wavering carpet. She flung out her shield but did not have the time to thicken it enough to soften her fall. She crashed to the floor, feeling as though her whole body had cracked like porcelain. She groaned, lying flat on her front with her head turned. Chaos reigned around her.
“Get up, kid!” Jax stood over her, yet his shouted command sounded far away. His hand was on her arm, trying to pull her up. Thea couldn’t move. A few feet away, Arthur also sprawled, too weak to get up and fight.
Thea’s eyes burned with tears, a combination of pain and failure. The shadows filled the room, hands reaching for the witches who fought them. Brandon was off somewhere, shouting and firing a gun.
“Come on, kid. I can’t lose ya now. I know you’ve got fight left in you,” Jax called, his voice soothing but still urgent.
Thea only felt hopeless. They were outnumbered and outmatched. Too many shadows circled them, shrieking like wraiths. Undead had come into the room. The walls were changing. Thea felt the floor under her moving, and her heart sank. The mage was winning. He’d outsmarted her. It didn’t matter if she’d gotten Arthur because they would all be sacrificed now.
Jax tried to pull Thea up, but he swiveled a second later, distracted by the front doors crashing open and bright, white light filling the space. Someone else had arrived. Through the fragments of light, Thea saw them. The faces of her remaining coven sisters who had promised to come.
Fucking finally, Thea thought as their light filled the front of the hotel, ripping through apparitions and undead.
The only thing that saved Brandon and Jax was Thea’s shield. The thought of them being torn apart had gotten her to sit up, at least. Her magic flared out, encasing them as the other witches’ power soared over them.
Finally, Thea’s shield dropped, and the witches strode in, surveying the scene with wary eyes. They spotted Arthur lying by the door and their coven Mother rushing toward them, face ashen. “Good thing you came,” Michelle told them.
“My question is, why didn’t they come earlier?” Jax growled.
One of the coven witches, considerably younger than most of the others, spun toward him. “We were held up,” she snapped. “Huge, spidery mechanical things attacked us. Probably from that bastard mage who caused this mess.” She gestured at their surroundings. “We came as soon as we could.”
“And we thank you for it,” Thea stated, rising to her feet at last. She tried to hide a limp but couldn’t. The fall had done serious damage. “I don’t think we’re finished. I still feel him nearby. I don’t have enough power to project, but he’s still here.”
“Hiding in the walls or some shit,” Brandon muttered.
The other witches sensed the mage’s foul magic permeating the air, too. The shadows were gone, the undead scattered in pieces across the destroyed lobby.
“Outside,” Mother Folsom called after seeing a figure standing beyond one of the many broken windows. She led everyone through the house and out a back door. In a tattered, weather-beaten yard, a new form took shape.
Brandon swallowed. Thea gasped. “That’s what I saw in the astral realm!”
A shadowy figure, more distinct than the last piece of shit they’d fought, strolled toward them. He wore a dark evergreen cloak, and a hood concealed his facial features. Silas, Brandon assumed. He’d like to give him a piece of his mind.
Thea’s hand was on his arm, stopping Brandon before he knew he had moved. “This doesn’t feel right.”
“No shit.”
“I mean, he’s not real. That’s only an illusion.”
The coven witches had already combined their power by standing in a circle. Eight of them fused their magic into one large orb. They spun, their cloaks fanning out as they hurled it toward the mage. The magic burst and rained over the figure, and it turned to dust.
“Just another magical construct,” Mother Folsom stated, confirming Thea’s last words. He’d been sent to distract them while the real Silas got away. Thea realized the Silas she had seen inside the astral realm might not be the real Silas either, but an effigy sent to speak on his behalf.
A tremendous crashing sound filled the air around them. They startled and turned to see the house caving in on itself.
“The mage is gone!” Thea cried over the commotion. “So his hellscape is collapsing, too!”
She recalled the last words he’d spoken to her inside the Lake realm. He was leaving them here to take the city. He’d guaranteed they would be exhausted and magically depleted so they could not follow him. He could do whatever the hell he wanted now, and Thea and her team couldn’t stop him. The coven might mount some attack, but it wouldn’t be much, especially with only eight of the thirteen here.
“We’ll be drawn into the darkness as it’s sucked back into the Lake realm if we don’t leave immediately,” Mother Folsom urged them.
All of it had been a farce. The house, the mage, the shadows. It had been an illusion to keep them fighting until they could no longer pursue the real danger. Thea’s heart thudded. I’ve failed.
Brandon’s hand was on her arm, pulling her away. “We have to go.”
Thea stumbled after the others out of the yard and down the street as an implosion of dark magic sounded. The darkness that had formed the house and all the dangers within vanished as though it had never been there.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“The very act of putting these words to paper is misdeed. Pressing quill to ink and ink to parchment will be my greatest sin. I have spoken the words in these pages to my pupils, but they will one day die, and the world may forget what I found out. Why do I write, you might ask? Because the power in these pages will be discovered anyway.
“The sin is in giving this knowledge to humans who will use it to destroy and tarnish an already broken world. I write these words in secret, hoping that one day, one will come to bring balance to it all. There might be one who will take this power and not be driven to madness with it.”
—An excerpt from the first pages of Ambrosius’ first volume of the Ancient’s Grimoire, which was removed during the first translation before it was lost
The mage had escaped. If he had ever been there to begin with.
They had gotten Arthur out, at least. Technically speaking, they had succeeded in their initial mission. The city was at risk of falling into a pit of blackness much larger than the one the house had been sucked into, but hey, they’d rescued Mother Folsom’s skinchanger, right? They would all be taken into another realm, made a great sacrifice to…
Well, Brandon hadn’t a damn clue beyond that. They were missing a piece of this puzzle and could not make their next move until they had it.
These things went through Brandon’s mind as the group gathered at the coven estate after traveling through a portal the witches had made. The transport was much easier than a two-hour drive, and they arrived mere minutes after the Port Street house implosion. Mother Folsom and her witches were exhausted, though not as much as Brandon’s team and certainly not like Arthur, who’d been taken away for healing.
Later, Brandon promised himself, they’d question the skinchanger. Not only was Arthur too battered and traumatized to speak now, but he was belligerent, unaware of where he was and who he was with. He had seemed in his right mind the moment he came out of the astral realm, but since then had spun out. His mind had unraveled under the pressure of what he’d gone through.
Brandon didn’t like Arthur much, but he didn’t blame him either. Let the poor man at least have the dark magic infesting his body drawn out. A few cleansing rituals, food, a bath, and sleep. Then questions.
Brandon forced himself to be okay with standing in Mother Folsom’s office late at night instead of being in his own bed. He took a moment to examine the state his team was in. Personally, he was roughed up, sore in almost every part of his body, and on the brink of fatigue he could not compare to anything he’d been through.
Jax was doing the best of the three of them. No doubt, Jax’s past military experience had helped him tonight. Thea was in the worst state. After projecting herself several times and bringing Arthur back with her, seeing the mage or an illusionary version of him, and being flung by a mass of shadows twenty feet to the ground, it was a miracle she was still standing.
Well, sitting. The second they’d entered the office, Thea sank into the nearest chair and started mending an ugly gash in her leg with a combination of her magic and the herbs Mia packed for her.
All around them, candle flames came to life with a flutter of Mother Folsom’s hand. The coven Mother took her seat behind the desk, looking as though she had not spent the past several hours in battle. Brandon couldn’t fathom how his team had come out looking like they’d walked through hell and the coven had not. He and Jax remained standing. So did many of the coven members except the older Sabbat leaders, who sat in the remaining chairs.
“Good work tonight, sisters,” Mother Folsom told the coven women. “We have one of our own back safely in our hands without losing one of us. Each of you should be proud of your work tonight.”
Brandon considered swiping everything off Mother Folsom’s desk in a rage when the woman didn’t bother acknowledging Thea’s work or thanking her. Thea had gone into the Lake realm and saved Arthur. Thea had found out about the mage and discovered the farce in the end. She couldn’t have done it all on her own, but these coven witches sure as hell hadn’t done as much as her.
Brandon stepped forward, about to say as much when Mother Folsom’s sharp gaze cut to him. “Thank you for your assistance, Agent Cole and team.” She nodded at Jax and Thea. “It will not be forgotten.”
Assistance? “I seem to remember we asked you to help us because of the danger at large,” Brandon replied, his voice like ice. “I don’t know why you’re all acting like this is over. The mage is still out there. He escaped or was never there in the first place. Either way, he’s not finished. Just because he doesn’t have Arthur anymore doesn’t mean he’s forgotten about the ritual. Don’t you understand what’s happening?”
Mother Folsom’s expression remained unreadable. “I have done what is best for my coven, Agent Cole. Whatever threat remains out there is for AID to handle.” She gave him a tight smile. “Isn’t that the reason your organization exists? To catch rogue mages?”
“This mage isn’t like the others,” Thea insisted. She stood, wobbling for a second before she strode to the desk. She stood between the seated Sabbat leaders and leaned on the oak, pinning Mother Folsom to her seat with a hard stare.
