Chasing Magic (43 page)

Dull pain blossomed in her cheek, distracting her long enough to make her remember. Somewhere she realized Lex had hit her—well, she realized it when the pain happened again. It didn’t hurt that much; she had no idea if it would have if she’d been able to really feel. But it hurt enough to bring her back to herself for a second—to make her realize he’d somehow managed to short out the protection spell or whatever it was Lex carried—and that second was all she needed.

It was also all she got. She’d just started the
Arketa
again when the white before her eyes changed to black, and a sick miasma of neon colors swirled before them, like being trapped in a nightmare kaleidoscope. He was fighting her, all right. He was trying to obscure anything she might see, anything she might find, throwing images and shit at her to hide himself.

No fucking way was she going to let that work.

She grabbed hold of the cord, that invisible cord of magic, and yanked it as hard as she could.

The line vibrated. She felt it in her head, felt it reverberate along all of the connected lines. If it had any effect on the crowd of bespelled bodies outside, she couldn’t tell, but the way it shook gave her something, and it was all she needed.

It gave her the master bag, the heart of the spell. It wasn’t on the
Agneta Katina
. It
was
the
Agneta Katina
. The whole fucking ship. He’d painted it with ghost-and-magic-infused paint; he’d hidden the spell ingredients all over it, from stem to stern, and he’d activated it.

Holy fuck, the entire ship was a spell bag. How the hell was she supposed to destroy that?

The bay. The bay was running water, right? And running water could break a spell, purify its parts. So she had to get the ship submerged in it, that was all.

She had to sink a motherfucking freighter, and she had to do it on her own.

Another wave of horror washed over her, more sights and sounds she didn’t want to see or hear again in her life. More shit crawling all over her, so real it made her already pounding heart start jerking around like an electrocuted nerve. He was fighting back, fighting harder, shit, she couldn’t breathe—

“Arketa restikah, arketa restikah …”

It wasn’t working. She felt—she practically heard—him chuckle as he sent more power throbbing down the
line at her, enough to knock her down, to send her flying from her body.

More pain across her face. She wanted to tell Lex to quit fucking slapping her but really, what else was he supposed to do? She didn’t have the breath, anyway, and when she did she had more important things to tell him.

“The ship,” she croaked, or at least tried to; she could only hope he was able to hear her. “We have to destroy the ship.”

She thought he replied, but whatever he said was lost, too quiet for her to hear over the airplane-engine roar of magic in her head. An explosion, that’s what she needed. Fire could destroy the spell, too.

But the ship was steel. Steel didn’t burn. She didn’t think steel melted, either, and even if it did, it would be at temperatures way hotter than any she could generate.

The cord vibrated. An order. He was ordering his crowd to do something, to— Shit. He was ordering them into the building. Ordering them after her.

Sight and hearing came rushing back to her, just enough for her to see them outside, hear them pounding on the wood over the street-level windows. It barely registered in her mind before Lex started running, pulling her along after him, into the workshop and the tunnel below— No, not into it. She heard him say something, but she didn’t know what it was, and it didn’t matter because she saw it, too. Water. The tide was in, the tunnel impassable.

Lex kicked open the back door of the workshop and dragged Chess into the alley behind it. Thank fuck, at least that was empty. Too bad it wouldn’t be for long; she could feel him watching her. He’d send them after her, they’d keep coming, and no way could she fight them all off. No way could Lex or all of Bump’s men fight them off. They didn’t think, didn’t feel, and the power the sorcerer had put into them would keep them
moving even after their bodies were ruined, crushed.… They were an army no one could defeat.

Her mind screamed for escape; her body screamed for more speed. He wanted her to do more, wanted to pull her deeper under his spell. She fought it as hard as she could, exhaustion creeping into her head even as her limbs buzzed and jerked from the drugs already in her system.

“Lex.” Could he hear her? “Lex, it’s the boat. The boat is the spell. We have to destroy the boat.”

Whatever reply he might have made was lost in the wave of magic thundering over her again. So much, and so strong; she couldn’t fight that, couldn’t beat him, and couldn’t destroy the
Agneta Katina
.

Lex had pushed her all the way down the alley behind the taxidermist’s so they were on the docks again, and the horde had turned to them. They were coming, this was it, they were coming— The key.

She had the key.

She had the key, and she’d managed to short out the magic earlier. She’d shorted out the spell in the center of it, and she hadn’t been part of it. Something was happening in the conscious part of her mind, some sort of idea forming. She had the key, and she’d been able to overpower the spell, even if for only a short moment.

And she hadn’t been part of it then; now she was. Did that give her an advantage? She wanted to think it did but she couldn’t think anything, she was so tired of thinking, tired of fighting.

Colors over her eyes, pain in her chest from her heart slamming itself against her ribs, aching in her limbs from trying to move, from fighting the spell’s control and the almost overwhelming desire to do another bump, another hit, to chop herself a fresh thick line and vacuum it up, lose herself in it for good. More images flashed
before her, like a movie she never wanted to see again in the last moments of her life.

No. She dug her heels in, dimly aware of another pain in her jaw; whether it was from Lex or from gritting her teeth so hard, she didn’t know or care.

Magic flowed all along the cord, connecting her to the sorcerer, to all his other victims. Of course it did; the cord was made of magic, wasn’t it? Was it? Confusion flowed along and mixed with the magic. Where was she, what was she doing? Was she part of the spell, or was she imagining it all? Was she dreaming? Before her eyes were faces, lights, spreading pools of red and blue and green; was it real? Was the dim shadowy shape of a ship she could just make out beyond the colors and lights real?

She spun at the end of the cord, leaving her body, riding a wave of smooth cold magic embedded with shards of glass. Being controlled, fighting against it, but knowing she couldn’t win, and her instincts were to curl up, block it out, leave her body, because she’d been there so many times before.

But she could feel them, all of the others. Feel them following orders, coming for her, as if they were all part of a vast singular consciousness. She wanted to come for herself; she was hunter and hunted, and the confusion of it helped her break free. Helped her fight back.

She reached into her bag, shouting the
Arketa
in her head as loud as she could. It took her a minute to remember it; the words got lost on her tongue. But the spell’s power receded enough for her to take a breath, for her to realize that Lex had pushed her up a flight of stairs, that she was in some kind of tower on the docks. His voice in sharp Cantonese made a familiar background as she grabbed that moment of clarity and held on to it with all her might.

She dug in her bag for the key, barely noticing the
way its energy zinged up her arm. She grabbed whatever else she could find, not even sure why she was grabbing some of it: cobwebs and a chunk of snake, a black mirror and a small pouch full of bones and claws. Ajenjible and sapodilla seeds, corrideira and powdered salamander eyes.

The pile of spell ingredients before her grew, while she slipped in and out of consciousness and kept tossing things onto it. Everything she had, a huge mishmash of odds and ends, and it dawned on her that some spells would explode if they were turned back on themselves.

Most dark spells would do that, in fact.

Shock transmitted itself down the cord to her. Fuck, he’d heard her thoughts, felt what she was doing. The tower in which she stood started to rock, pushed and pulled by bespelled hands with supernatural strength.

Time to make a choice. She might have enough power to use the key, to overtake the spell and set the horde free, even if only for a brief time. She might have enough power to feed into an anti-spell to make the original spell—and the
Agneta Katina
—explode.

But she didn’t have enough power to do both.

She chose the ship.

He felt her choice; fresh power burst along the cord, burst into her body, kicking her out of it. She watched it crumple, watched Lex picking her up, from what felt like a very great distance.

Watched Lex grab his gun and start shooting at the boat, heard other gunshots echoing off the steel. More men—Lex’s men, Bump’s men—on top of buildings, shooting at the crowd, shooting at the boat. Yes! Thank fuck for Lex, Lex and that twisted brain of his. A distraction was what she’d needed and he’d given her one, and she thudded back into her body and gasped, “Get me on the ship. Hurry up,” as she threw her magic items back into her bag.

The next few minutes—it could have been minutes, it could have been hours; she had no idea—passed in a haze of power and exhaustion. What sounded like hundreds of gunshots still broke the eerie silence around them, and the tower rocked harder. Lex pushed her up against the windows, his arms on either side of her, pressing her against the glass. She managed to open her mouth—so dry, it was so fucking dry—and croak out, “What are you—”

“Hang on, Tulip,” he replied, and she looked down and saw it wasn’t just the bespelled horde at the base of the tower but Lex’s men, and it dawned on her what he was doing.

“Oh, you’re fucking kidding—”

The tower went down.

Glass exploded around her, tiny shards embedding themselves in her skin, tiny stings of pain everywhere. She welcomed it. It focused her, dragged her back into her body as another massive pulse of magic slammed down the cord and into her head. She focused on the pain, forced herself to stay with it, and opened her eyes to find herself hovering a few feet above the angry surface of the bay.

Her hands had found the metal bars framing the now-empty windows; she gripped the bars tighter, her body aching with tension and effort, and tried not to fall into the water.

At least until she realized that she needed to fall into the water, needed to do it fast, because the horde was crawling along the fallen tower. She was going to end up in the bay no matter what; the question was whether she did it on her own steam or because they pushed her, and something told her that if they pushed her, she wouldn’t be getting out alive.

The rope ladder hung off the side of the
Agneta
only a few feet away. She could reach it. She’d have to reach it.

Of course, chances were good someone would slice it when she was halfway up, but as with so many other things, she didn’t have a choice. So she let go of the bars and fell into the icy blackness below.

Fuck, she hated the water. It covered her, knocked the wind out of her. She tried to open her eyes but couldn’t see, tried to surface but couldn’t tell which way was up. Hands grabbed her, yanked at her hair; she fought against them until she realized they were Lex’s, and just as her lungs felt ready to explode, her head broke the surface.

That wasn’t much better. Already the horde splashed into the water around her, coming for her. Lex dragged her—she’d never realized he knew how to swim, let alone that he was pretty good at it—toward the boat, much faster than she could have made it alone. It seemed like an endless struggle in the freezing cold sea of blackness, trying to keep hold of Lex while furious magic tore down the cord and into her soul.

But the sorcerer hadn’t cut the ladder. It wasn’t until she closed her hand around it that she realized why. Of course he hadn’t cut it. He wanted her to come up there, wanted to kill her and be done with it, with her. Wanted, maybe, to pull her deeper into his spell and use her power to make it even stronger.

Her muscles shook with effort as she dragged herself up the rope, her palms burning from the rough fibers, her legs aching. Yes, he was waiting for her up there, waiting to kill her, because the magic binding her receded enough for her to think and that had to be the reason.

She could still feel it, though. Still feel him ordering his horde around, driving them into the water, driving them to further violence. More gunshots behind her; she knew without looking that the horde had turned on Lex’s men, that they’d started fighting again in earnest.

Where was Terrible in all of that? What was he doing?

Not the time to think of it, not when she hit the little loading deck where she and Terrible had been earlier, with Lex right behind her. The rope twisted and jerked in her hands; more men followed, but whether they were Lex’s or the bespelled she had no idea, and she couldn’t pause to look. Instead, she ran down the hall to the stairs and up.

He was going to be waiting for her as soon as she got to the top deck. She knew it. She knew it, she knew it. She braced herself for the hand in her hair, the slash of steel across her throat.

With one last desperate plea to no one that she make it onto the deck alive, she hit the last flight of stairs and raced to the top, found the door to the deck, and burst through it.

Empty. No one stood there, no one waited for her, and the thought had barely registered when an explosion deafened her, a loud metallic gong right by her ear.

He wasn’t waiting for her there, no. He was waiting in the wheelhouse, in that tower on deck, and he was shooting at her.

All of that flew through her mind in a barely coherent rush as she threw herself sideways, hugging the steel wall. Where to go, where to go? Running toward the wheelhouse would bring her closer to him, where she’d be an easier target, but where the hell else could she go? No place to hide, not that she could see.