Twisted Secrets: Twisted Magic Book 6, page 9
“We’ll have to get them back,” I said, but my voice was quiet and I sounded unsure even to myself. I didn’t doubt we could find the portraits again—they were probably still in the vault pocket world where we had left them; Kurash had no reason to move them anywhere else—but I was yet again asking for sacrifices from my friends. Another journey, another round of potential danger.
Who was I to expect so much from them?
Randall’s expression softened. “Saf, we really need to come up with a plan. A good one, this time.”
My throat constricted. He hadn’t said no; just the opposite, he was going to join me—again.
I nodded tightly. “We can try, but we don’t know what we’re up against. We don’t know what will be in the pocket world, what we will find when we get there.”
I wasn’t helping my cause any, but it was the truth. None of my friends were idiot enough not to realize what we were about to do.
“If you can sense hidden magic too, why don’t you go?” Sasmita asked, her words sharp but her intention was fair.
“It might be a huge waste of a trip,” I said, shuffling to rest up against the motorhome, farther down from Otilia. “When we were there before, I picked up nothing, no sign of a passageway, no sign of any concealed magic. We can’t make two trips, one to test if I’m as good as Sachin and then the inevitable next one, when we realize I’m not. We need him to show us how to get into the vault.”
“It’s so dangerous,” Sasmita said, but she relented a little.
“We’ll do everything to protect him,” I said. “Scout’s honor. Randall was a boy scout, after all. He takes that pretty seriously.”
His expression pinched, but humor lit his eyes. “I take us all not dying pretty seriously.”
“We can do this,” I said. My body protested the plan, but I shoved down the patchwork of aches and pains. “We have to, I think. The world isn’t going to survive much longer with the dark witches and mages running free. The two left are bad enough, and their destruction will eventually consume the world. I give it a few months, tops, if that. But the others, the ones in the portraits, won’t remain there much longer, if they still are. Once they are free again, they’ll speed up the end of the world—a lot. Like weeks. Days.”
Randall sucked in a breath, but I barreled onwards.
“That’s probably not even the worst. Whatever the fifth god has planned, I doubt it was just to see his little darlings skip through the fields again. Why would the wielders show up then? Why were they trying to find the necromancer? See? There’s so much more happening. And where the hell did my magic come from? Somehow, I was given a pretty significant boost by a god, and it seems there’s only five who could do that—the consortium, or the fifth god. My money is on him, but why did he rope me into this?”
Everyone was staring at me, about to fall over from the weight of what I had just thrown at them.
“Got all that off your chest now?” Randall said. “It’s a compelling argument, but so is not dying.”
“We won’t. We’ll go straight to the vault, have Sachin find the passageway. Then—”
“Then, we take him right back home before we go find the portraits,” Sasmita said. “He must be guarded, shielded at all times. Some of us will go ahead and others will bring up the rear. He must be in the middle, always. We can’t let our guard down for a moment. He must never be out of sight. Never.”
I nodded along as she spoke.
She made an exasperated noise. “I can’t believe I’m even considering this.”
I couldn’t either, and not just her, but all of us.
We exchanged looks and then, without another sound, trooped back inside to bring the others up to speed on our plan.
Once more, we would be heading into the unknown.
11
As soon as I stepped into the motorhome, behind Randall, I realized one little flaw in the plan to storm the vault: Fiona. We couldn’t leave her here alone, not when she was both defenseless and dangerous, but I wasn’t prepared to leave behind any capable hands and eyes. We needed everyone to join us this time to help keep Sachin safe. As a perk, we would also have more bodies to lug the four ridiculously heavy portraits.
Fiona had to come with us. No other immediate options presented themselves, and I wasn’t about to concoct some other idea. We didn’t have time.
Amari raised her eyes from her new sketching, mid progress, on the table in front of her. “Are you serious?”
I guess we hadn’t been so quiet outside.
Sachin sat huddled up in the corner by my bag, playing tic-tac-toe with himself on a piece of paper that Amari must have given him.
“We’re going to need all the help we can get to return to the vault,” I said.
Chaand whimpered, tucked back in the corner of the bed, sitting with her knees drawn to her chest. In another life, she could have been a slight wood nymph.
“We can’t go back there,” she said, her voice quivering. “Kurash will find us.”
“There’s no way Kurash is still hanging out there,” Randall said.
“He must have moved on by now,” I said with a nod, resting my hand on the edge of the bed. “If anything, we’re safer from him there because he won’t expect us to come back.”
“But the winged men,” Amari said.
Sachin’s head jerked up at us. “There are winged men?”
“It’s fine,” Sasmita said, going to him. She brushed the top of his head with her palm. “You’re to stay with me at all times, okay?”
He tipped his head back to look up at her. “Where are we going?”
“Some place where we need your help.” She crouched down to eye level with him where he sat. “You know how you can find hidden magic that even I can’t see? Like you did with Safiya’s necklace?”
He nodded, but hesitation darkened his eyes.
“Well, we need you to do that again, to find us a path into a very important building.” She cupped his cheek, tipping his face to hers. “It’s going to be very difficult, and we’ll have to be brave. Can you be brave one more time?”
“Yes,” he whispered. “The world is going to die if we’re not.”
He had heard us, outside. He had heard everything.
Sasmita hugged him tight, fighting back tears. She had spent half a year worried about his safety, that he would ever make it home. Now she had him, and we were about to march back into danger, bringing him along with us. If we didn’t, we had even more to lose.
We couldn’t let this go wrong. Not this time.
Randall gathered Fiona, helping her to her feet. Amari and Otilia led the way out the door, followed by Sasmita, her hand on Sachin’s shoulder, keeping him close.
I offered my hand to Chaand. She hesitated, then crawled toward me, and with Randall and Fiona, we stepped outside.
As evening fell over us, the stars above lit up like eyes, watching with interest. We huddled together, shoulder to shoulder, some of us holding hands or wrapping our arms around each others’ shoulders. Chaand broke from the group and waved her hands through the air as magic sparked from her fingers and roiled through her.
A stone dais passageway pushed up from the ground in front of her. She looked back over her shoulder at us, and we shuffled forward, taking the steps in ones and twos. Magic curled up around us, bringing us back to the pocket world with the vault, giving us one last chance to succeed where we had failed. I stepped up with Randall.
The passageway opened to the ruins, where we had followed Kurash and his army toward the vault. There were no signs of him and his men, no sign of us having been here. And no sign of the winged Ares fighters.
That meant nothing. Lately, situations took sharp turns and, as Sasmita had said, we couldn’t let our guard down. Not for a moment.
If nothing else, Sachin’s life depended on it. I would not add him to the list of people I had failed.
Without preamble, we fell into order, all of us seeming to accept we would unlock the vault before tracking down the portraits. Chaand led the way, her soles barely leaving the ground, and Randall and me, with Fiona between us, following right behind her. A few feet back, Sasmita kept Sachin tight against her side. Amari and Otilia brought up the rear. Amari’s magic tinted her fingers red and yellow like the sunset. Otilia had no magic, but she was still a huntress, and her sharp gaze watched the sky and treated every corner as suspect. Had she been with us before, we would have never been ambushed at the vault. Bhaskar would have still been alive.
Bhaskar. I swallowed hard. What had become of him? Had Kurash sent someone to collect the body, or would his corpse still be lifeless, crumpled in his alcove? Chaand didn’t need to see that.
As we marched on, the vault came into view in glimpses in the distance past the stone archways.
My breath hitched. Even though I had seen the vault before, the enormity of the structure, dignified and imposing, still startled me. Daylight did nothing to diminish its extravagance.
“Okay,” Sasmita said in a low voice from behind me. “Sachin, that’s the building we need to get into. There is a secret way in, using magic, but only you can find it.”
“It’s over there,” he said, without hesitation.
I stumbled a little, then looked back at him as he pointed into the distance, past the vault. Had he picked up on the secret passageway already? No need to feel around, sense the stone, stare into space?
Did he actually hear magic? I felt it, sometimes understood it as calling to me, but he seemed to hear it like music, or static. Perhaps one day he could clarify for us, but for today, he was doing more than anyone could ask—he was showing us a way into the vault that would contain the deadliest witches and mages to have ever roamed the earth. If he could never explain his method, we would just have to live with that.
“Is it behind the vault?” Sasmita asked, gentle as she kept her hand on his shoulder, refusing to let him stray from arm’s length.
“Yes, down behind it,” he said. “It’s in the ground.”
“In the ditch,” I muttered. “That trench that protects it from behind, that’s where it is?”
I tossed the question to Otilia. She had created the passage, after all.
“The vault was troublesome,” she said. “Creating a passageway is not an exact science. I had aimed for the ground to the side, but who knows? Even if I could tell you, I would have never been able to activate it myself, not without my magic. The bastards took my magic before I could ever find and use the passageway. It could be anywhere around here.”
“It’s in the ditch,” Sachin said without a trace of uncertainty.
How could he tell from this distance? Surely the magic didn’t provide that much detail?
Realization gripped my heart, squeezing tight. Sachin had been here before. Randall had been right—the person who had kidnapped Sachin originally, before Creed got ahold of him, had used Sachin to breach the vault.
That meant Sachin’s kidnapper was de Luca’s creator. Sachin had been taken by the fifth god.
“Sachin,” I said, whirling around to face him. “Who took you? What did he look like?”
Sasmita’s eyes widened as Sachin froze, staring at me with a stricken face.
“He…he doesn’t want to speak about that,” Sasmita said sharply. “Let it go, Safiya. He will tell us if he wants.”
Sachin turned pleading eyes to his mother.
“Don’t put my son through this,” she said with a growl. “He’s come here to do this. Don’t force it.”
Sasmita had every right to try to protect Sachin, and he needed to be. I agreed he had been through far too much already, but he was turning into a pivotal point in solving the dark ones, the vault, everything. He could fix this. He knew the fifth god.
The fifth god must have threatened to harm Sasmita if Sachin discussed anything about the abduction. What else would a psycho tell a little kid to guarantee his silence? The more I thought about the situation, the more I was surprised the fifth god hadn’t just killed Sachin to keep his secret.
Unless they had found a new use for him. Creed had known de Luca, and the seller wasn’t even a real person. I doubted Creed had been in the market for some new artwork for his house, so why would he have the construct that made up stories about his grandmother’s sangria in his contact list?
Perhaps he used him for something more. Like direct access to de Luca’s creator, the fifth god.
That meant it was no accident Creed had wound up with Sachin so quickly after Sasmita hired him to find her son. Creed had known where to find Sachin right away. The fifth god had agreed to give him Sachin to use as bait to keep Sasmita hooked, barely more than a servant in her quest to save her son.
Perhaps the fifth god had taken a special interest in Creed’s plight to resurrect the Forgotten Daughter. She was, of course, the fifth god’s first pet project, and the source of his split with the five, the reason he had been thrown out of the valley.
So he had spared Sachin’s life after breaching the vault only to continue to use him, this time for Creed to lure Sasmita to gather the blood that would bring back the Forgotten Daughter.
Sasmita had been setup, though I couldn’t quite imagine the full depth of what had happened yet. There was more. Something tied us all together, but I wasn’t sure what.
“We won’t let him hurt your mom,” I said, but Sachin was too smart to believe I had anything to say about that.
He shook his head but said nothing.
If the fifth god had threatened Sasmita’s life, there was no doubt in my mind he would make good on it if he found out Sachin had defied him. He would likely come after Sachin and the rest of us too.
The fact that we stood so close to having one more answer burned in my chest. It took everything in me to keep from prodding at the poor kid. He didn’t need this.
And yet…
As if sensing that I was ready to nudge him just one more time, Sasmita shot me a withering look.
I snapped my mouth shut and turned on my heel as the group progressed toward the vault.
We left the ruins behind and came to the clearing. The vault loomed ahead of us, blocking out the sun behind it. A thin halo of magic glowed along its edges.
My attention continued to flick to the alcove where Bhaskar had died, but from the ground, I could not make out if his body was still up there or not. Probably for the best.
I took Chaand’s hand, hoping to steer her away from any sudden breakdowns. Being so close to the vault had to be a painful dig at her still fresh wound, but she kept her focus toward the ground.
As a group, we veered around the vault, heading to the trench behind it. Sachin tried to go ahead of us, but Sasmita grabbed the shoulder of his shirt, tugging him back toward her.
Randall squeezed Fiona’s bicep. “Stay here, kiddo. We’ll be right back.”
He climbed down first, landing with a solid thud on his feet at the bottom. He stepped back as I came down after him, followed by Sasmita and Sachin. The others remained at the lip of the trench, keeping watch in the distance and the sky.
Otilia inched her way towards Chaand and stayed close.
As Sasmita helped Sachin down the last part of the climb, I turned to survey the sides of the trench. They went on in either direction into darkness. How long had it taken Sachin to find the passageway the first time? He must have been terrified, being kidnapped, taken from his mother, and held hostage. The fact he was still functional, still ready to come along with us said everything about his resilience. I hoped this was the end of testing that. Going forward, he needed time to heal.
Maybe we all did.
“It’s over here,” he said, starting forward.
Sasmita picked up her pace to keep up with him. We fell back, following after them. I perked up my senses, trying to pick up a vibe of some hidden magic. I had sensed it on the heart necklace taken from the house in New Orleans; I should be able to find the concealed passageway here too.
Except I didn’t.
Sachin led us to a dark shadow cast by a wide ledge on the side of the trench.
“It’s here, right in front of us,” he said. “Do you want me to open it?”
I blinked, taking a step back. Sasmita’s son was proving to be quite the force. I shouldn’t be surprised, given how powerful Sasmita had been since our first meeting. Still, her son seemed to have already surpassed her in several not-so-trivial ways, the wildest of which was that he possessed a skill not seen for at least two thousand years, if ever.
How could this be?
And why couldn’t I find this hidden magic? I could on the heart pendant necklace, but not when it came to Otilia’s passageway. I still couldn’t make sense of this development.
Sasmita looked at me. “You ready?”
My heartbeat sped up, but I nodded.
“Yes.” My voice broke. “Open it up, Sachin.”
He stepped forward, into the shadow, and raised his hands. From the earth, magic rose up, swirling around his ankles and climbing. As he pulled magic from the ground with not the least bit of effort, white splotches of lights twinkled around him. The shimmering light illuminated the shadowy depths of the trench as it flashed and glowed brighter.
Next to me, Sasmita covered her mouth, tears in her eyes shimmering in the light. It struck me that she had never seen her son like this. She knew he had magic, that he possessed skills that didn’t make sense to anyone, but she had never seen him unleash what he held within. As a witch who knew her bloodline, who had come into this world understanding magic, she had not reconciled that her son defied everything she had been told.
Sachin’s magic was not my own; it wasn’t his mother’s either.
A familiar stone dais pushed into existence under him. Slowly, the magic around him dissipated, and he lowered his arms.
A soft noise caught my attention. Otilia had climbed down the trench, and she stood a few feet behind us. Her chest worked with unshed tears.
For centuries, this passageway had been the elusive path that kept her from Yuto. Hiding it had been the last time had used her magic, before it had been stripped away by the consortium.
