Chasing Magic (35 page)

He was right. Her shaking hands found the gun, had just pulled it from her bag when she and Terrible hit the top of the stairs.

And found an army of magic-controlled zombies waiting for them.

The zombies didn’t make a sound. They moved en masse, their silence adding to the horror of it. Terrible started shooting; she started shooting, knowing it wouldn’t make a difference, that they wouldn’t feel it. Realizing, too, as she squeezed the trigger, that she was shooting at innocent people.

A couple of them fell. Blood splattered everywhere, on the walls, on the low ceiling, on the steel floor. None of the bespelled victims noticed it. None of them looked, none of them reacted, and tears in her eyes blurred their faces as she looked at them. They were just people, people who’d made a mistake, people who’d gone chasing a high and found magic and death instead.

Terrible pushed into the crowd of them; they clutched at him with bloody hands, swung at him with slick weapons, pipes and bats and wrenches. She kept squeezing the trigger, knowing the gun was empty, not knowing what else to do, until Terrible reached back to grab her hand and started dragging her along behind him.

Ow! Fuck, they were— A blow glanced off her shoulder, off her leg. Searing pain in her arm; a blade, someone was slashing at her, and blood ran down her hand to the floor. Shit, that wasn’t good. Magic in her blood, magic connected to her, and no time to clean it up. No time to even think about it, because stopping to think about it would probably mean dying.

She stumbled and almost fell, only Terrible’s grip keeping her semi-upright. The magic around them, the thick choking miasma of it, clogged her lungs, clouded her brain. Thank fuck he was standing, the sigil was working, he was still moving.

Moving well enough to run, in fact. He ran down the hall, his footsteps pounding on the carpeted floor, and she ran with him, trying without success to hold her arm tight enough to stop the bleeding.

The horde followed. Not running as fast, no, but following behind, close enough that fingers touched her back once or twice.

They reached the next staircase. Terrible yanked her into it, pushing the door behind him. It didn’t close all the way, of course—they were being chased too closely for that—but she appreciated his attempt. As much as she could appreciate anything, at least, because her stomach churned and her breath came in awful harsh gasps, burning her lungs. She fought to keep going up the stairs, up one flight, then two, and when they reached the top of each more of the bespelled appeared, more followed them, reaching for them with hands controlled by someone else. Fuck, how many of them were there?

Stupid fucking question. Half of Downside was there—or maybe not that many, but there was a reason the streets were so empty.

They’d reached the top of the third staircase. She thought it was the third, assumed it was, because Terrible spun around into the hall and ran to the right, back toward the end of the boat. Back toward the way they came, since they’d gone one stairway too far; back toward—she guessed—the captain’s room where Razor was supposed to be.

She was right. The hall outside an open door was stuffed with people, silent blank-faced people standing perfectly still. Waiting for them.

Terrible stopped short, his hand on her wrist. “Got any magic you can do?”

“No, I— Wait.” Blood dripped from her arm and trailed behind her. The bare feet of the bespelled were touching that blood, stepping in it. Iron filings and iron-ring water had weakened the spell before, right? Not enough, but a little?

And the key, the one Edsel had given her. The key connected somehow to whatever magic was being done.

She had to separate those bodies from that magic. Had to break the magical connection controlling their souls, the magic-bound ectoplasm, the— Her glance fell on Terrible’s arm. Terrible’s sigil.

An overload of magic interrupted the energy of the sigil holding his soul in place. Only for a second, yes, and not permanently, but long enough to make him—to make his soul escape.

So maybe, if she could somehow send a jolt of
extra
magic through the bodies, she could disconnect them from the magic holding them?

It probably wouldn’t last, just as Terrible’s soul always came back because of the sigil. But it might confuse the
zombies. It might give her and Terrible the few seconds they needed to get away.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe I do.”

Or maybe she didn’t. She probably didn’t. But what the hell. She could at least make the attempt, right?

Footsteps on the stairs behind them; they’d managed to put some space between themselves and their attackers, but not much. Not enough.

Or so she thought, until Terrible kicked open a door to her right and pushed her through it, slammed it behind them.

She didn’t need him to tell her they didn’t have much time. She was already digging in her bag, yanking out everything and anything she could think of. The key, tingling in her palm. Some powdered crow’s bone, some sapodilla seeds, some goat’s blood—that could work, mixed with her blood.

She needed more than that. She didn’t have more. It would have to do.

She set her firedish on the floor, moving as quickly as her shaking hands would allow. The door started vibrating: fists of the bespelled beating it, shaking it in its frame. Shit, shitshitshit, hurryhurryhurry …

The herbs went in the firedish. She touched her lighter to them, blew on them gently to make them catch faster, and pulled out her knife. “Power to power, these powers bind.”

The door shook harder. Terrible braced his back against it. They were in some kind of storage room, some kind of closet; she had the vague impression of brooms and mops and shit like that, the smell of ammonia and bleach stinging her nose.

Stinging her nose and mixing with the sharp fragrance of the herbs in the firedish. Okay. She set the point of her knife against her left pinkie and sliced. Not enough blood from that; she knew there wouldn’t be. She braced
herself and set the point of her knife against the wound in her arm and dragged it, widening the cut so blood flowed faster, ignoring the stinging pain. Her blood fell on the burning herbs as she waved her arm over them, droplets sizzling and smoking, billows of smoke rising to make her eyes burn even more than they already did from the pain.

She moved her arm to the side so it dripped on the floor. Shit, she hoped this worked, because if it didn’t—

The door cracked in the top corner, big sharp splinters falling to the floor. She looked up at Terrible.

Their eyes met. In them she saw that same confidence she always saw, his confidence in her. Biggest mistake he’d ever made, wasn’t it, trusting her? When she had no idea what she was doing—no idea in their relationship, and no idea at that moment, pulling some vague theory for a spell out of her ass and gambling on it saving their lives.

Fuck, please let this work.… Please let her know what to do.

The smoke thickened. Her blood covered the floor. She dumped the vial of goat’s blood into the puddle, emptied her little packets of herbs, grabbed the key. Time to go.

She looked up at Terrible again, holding out her hand for him to take. Really looked at him, knowing it was a second they couldn’t spare but needing it. Needing to say something to him one more time, even if she couldn’t say it out loud. Needing to see him do the same thing, needing and getting that second or two when everything stopped around them and his skin was warm against hers, when the strength of his fingers was like strength in her soul and just touching him, knowing he was there, made her feel so
safe
. Even then, even knowing she was very possibly about to die … he was there, and she was safe as long as he was.

Her lungs ached from the hot smoky air she sucked into them, one last deep breath, and she nodded.

Terrible opened the door.

He stepped back, yanking her to her feet and to the side as the crowd pushed into the room. The movement sent fresh pain shooting up her arm, sent droplets of blood flying off her arm. Good. The more of it she could get to touch them, the more she could spread around, the better.

Especially better was the sight of the bespelled slipping on her blood, falling, their bodies hazy outlines in the clearing smoke. Her blood, strengthened with energy and herbs, touching them—it might be a start. She hoped it was a start.

In her shaking left hand she still held the key. She didn’t really know how to use it, but she had it. Maybe— Yes, worth a try.

The room was full. Terrible tugged her out through the doorway, punching his way through the crowd, kicking at those who fought back. Hands pulled her hair, more hits on her head and limbs, more pain. Twice on the top of the head, fast and hard so her vision jangled and her knees buckled.

It was just the two of them, just her and Terrible in the center of a horde of grasping hands and blank faces. The key burned her skin; it hurt. It burned and hurt because ghost magic and iron didn’t mix, and the key was both. It burned her skin because she was pushing her own magic into it, and that didn’t mix.

It wasn’t safe to do it. It could overload her, could deaden her. Hell, it could kill her. But Terrible had to get out. She couldn’t let him die there.

She sucked in a deep breath, hard, wishing to fuck there was something mixed in with it to calm her down. It was all down to her, she had to be the one. He was counting on her.

What words of power should she use? A Banishing spell, a— No. She was supposed to increase the power.

Hard to do with her heart pounding so hard and her chest so tight and her breath coming so fast, but this was her job. The one thing—well, okay, one of two things—she knew she could do. Knew she was good at, damn it.

So she took as deep a breath as she could, feeling her chest—her whole body—fill with every bit of power she could summon, ducked down, and shoved it all into the key. Into the key, into her blood, into the air already thick with smoke and magic.
“Garmarak kedentia ronlo prientardus!”

The words shot heat, strong raging heat, up her legs, into her head, like a pot boiling over. Words to build and enhance magic, words to make it stronger, combined with everything she was pushing into the key—she shook, barely able to keep her fingers closed over the iron as it turned white-hot against the floor.

Power spread from it, though, radiated from it. She felt it racing along the floor, crawling up the walls and the legs of the possessed and into the air. She’d been right. She’d been right about her blood giving it a kick, increasing the power, been right about the smoke and the key.

But she’d also been right about the cost, about what it required, about how mixing magic with iron wasn’t a great idea. Well of course she’d been right about that, it was one of the first things they learned in training, and when you considered that the iron in question—the key—was coated with ectoplasm-infused paint, it was worse. Iron and ghosts didn’t mix, and by pushing her power through the paint, through the key and into the iron itself, she was trying to make it mix.

The iron rebelled. Her body rebelled. Fuck, it felt like she was dying; her insides twisted and writhed, and the
key hurt to hold. Waves of blackness, dizzy and sick, washed over her, through her.

Her legs gave. She slumped to the floor, thankfully sparing her knees but not her forehead, which hit the steel with a painful thud. Her fingers burned. Her bangs stuck to her forehead from sweat; her already itching and tingling body felt sticky and slick from it.

Still she pushed. Still she drew power from everything and everywhere she could. It wasn’t enough; it couldn’t be enough. The floor weaved in her vision and burned her arm when she fell onto it. She barely noticed. All of her focus was on the key in her fingers, the horrible sick heat of it. She had to give more, there had to be more power somewhere, more power inside her.

Thudding in her ears: her heartbeat, the sound of her blood in her veins like waves crashing against the shore in a hurricane, louder and faster. Her lungs didn’t seem to work properly. Dizziness clouded her vision, made her feel as if she clung to the key in the middle of a swirling vortex, a hellish merry-go-round that threatened to fling her off into nothingness at any second. She was weakening, she was losing …

The floor beneath her vibrated, but was that from falling bodies or just because she was shaking? Looking up would be a good idea; she should look up, should check and see what was happening, but it seemed like an impossible thing to do.

And she wasn’t sure she wanted to, either. She’d been trying to override the spell, trying to override a spell like Terrible’s sigil; what if she’d done so and done it so well he’d never come back? Yes, Elder Griffin’s sigil had been holding—but for how long?

How long had she even been there? It felt as if she’d been lying on that floor for hours, for days, as if her muscles had frozen in that position and she’d never be able to move again.

But she did. Through the illness, the wavering vision that distorted everything, she saw bodies staggering, falling, and getting back up. Not enough. It wasn’t enough, fuck, she wasn’t strong enough, she was going to die. She and Terrible were both going to die.

That wasn’t good enough.

She turned back to the key, focused on it as much as she could. Words of power came to her choked, dry throat; she croaked them out, not really feeling as if they were helping but doing it anyway.

The City rose before her. The City of Eternity, the malicious dead waiting to sink cold hooks into her flesh. The darkness, the emptiness, the fear she’d never been able to express to anyone. It washed over her, flooded her system with horror.

But Terrible’s life was on the line. Well, Terrible could die from the spell itself, if Elder Griffin’s sigil failed to hold; was Terrible dying? She couldn’t think of it, couldn’t not think of it, and he was strong in her mind and her heart as she dug deeper, focused harder.

Somewhere inside her was a wellspring of hate. A small furious ball of it, a ball of rage and pain, the knowledge that she wasn’t good enough and never would be, that she deserved all of the pain she’d gotten in her life, all of the abuse. She’d been born bad; she’d been born with something … something wrong with her, something she could never make right. She didn’t belong in the world.