Chasing Magic (44 page)

Men tumbled onto the deck behind her, surrounding her, pushing her along. More gunshots. Bodies fell; screams rose into the air; and she kept running.

If she left the deck and reentered the boat to do her spell, she’d be better able to hide. If she was belowdecks when the spell exploded—if it did, please let it explode—she’d almost definitely die.

The whole boat housed the spell, the whole thing, but
somewhere in there had to be the heart of it, whatever totem or ingredient or whatever he was charging it with.

It was in the wheelhouse. That’s why he was there. Not just to watch her but to guard his spell.

Okay, then.

She pivoted and ran back, charging the tower with her head down. More clangs as bullets hit the metal beneath her feet; she saw naked steel appear beneath chips in the paint, moonlight shining off the bare spots like stars trapped in the floor.

Lex pushed in front of her when she hit the wheelhouse door. He yanked it open and shoved his gun in, nearly deafening her with the sound of shots in the small space. Not all his, either. Fuck, this was it, she was going to die—

No. The connection—the cord of magic—had been silent for so long she’d almost managed to forget it existed, but something about the way Lex’s men jostled around her, the way they moved in unison, reminded her. No, she might not have enough power to short out the spell, but neither did she need to. She was
inside
the spell. She wasn’t its master but she had power of her own, and she knew how to get more, and she didn’t need to short out anything or take over anything in order to do it.

He’d given it to her. The smug son of a bitch had given it to her, and she was going to take it.

If she hadn’t been so scared she would have laughed. As it was she closed her eyes, took one long, deep breath, and reached out.

She reached out to all of them, all of them connected to her by the spell that trapped them. She reached out and found their energy, weak as it was, found the power connecting them, wrapped her hands around it, and yanked. Hard.

Energy flooded into her, so much energy her vision went black. She struggled with it, trying to force it into
something smooth, something coherent, and when the sorcerer’s rage came through to her clear and strong she absorbed that, too. Absorbed everything, as much as she could, until she felt as if she’d explode if someone even touched her, as if her skin was stretched tight around a glowing ball of magic.

She couldn’t beat him and his spell with her own power, no. But she could do it with his.

At least, she really fucking hoped she could.

She barreled through the door, shoved the power up the cord as hard as she could, and aimed it all at him. Through the line she felt him stagger with it, felt him brace himself, and while he was doing that she raced up the stairs on feet she barely felt.

And found Mr. Carmichael—Kyle Blake’s “assistant,” the elegant gray-suited man she’d met at his house—struggling to stand as he braced himself on some sort of instrument panel behind him, magic throbbing all around him in a haze she could practically see. Magic
he
generated; it was him. Of course.

The instrument panel; the wheelhouse. The heart of the ship. The heart of the spell. She felt it the second her feet hit the floor. Felt its seductive dark call snaking through the air, adding to the power already inside her.

Carmichael wasn’t the only one in the room. But he was the only one who mattered. Lex’s men had headed straight for him, straight for his guards; the air in the small space filled with violence and the sound of flesh against flesh, with groans and last breaths. Chess ignored it. He’d come for her in a second, Carmichael would, he’d throw off Lex’s men and come for her, and she had to get her spell—her anti-spell—ready before he did, because she couldn’t beat him. Even the borrowed power thrumming in her body wasn’t good enough, because it was his power; she’d managed to surprise him
with it and knock him off balance, yes, but she couldn’t hold him off for long.

Where was the power source?

Bodies knocked into hers, forced her to crouch and brace herself as she searched, her skin prickling as she felt his eyes on it. He was coming, he was coming, she didn’t have time to set everything up; all she could do was hope for the best.

From her pocket she pulled her knife. From her bag she pulled the mirror and snake, the herbs wet from their dip in the bay but hopefully no less powerful. Where to set them—

Hands in her hair, yanking her, knocking her to the floor. Carmichael’s furious face above her, his eyes blazing with rage as he lifted a shining blade over her head, ready to bring it down.

The second he touched her, the spell inside her—the speed and the magic—washed over her again. She was connected to him, connected so deep, and when that thought hit her mind she realized that he was the power source. The boat housed the spell, but he was its master. Things moved beneath his skin—what the fuck was that? How was he even alive, how the fuck did that work—

Lex slammed Carmichael in the side of the head with his gun; Carmichael fell sideways, catching himself before he tumbled off Chess. His knife fell sideways, too, slicing into her arm, and as her blood fell on his skin, as it fell onto the floor of the wheelhouse, she saw the horror in his eyes and guessed at what it meant.

If she was right, she’d win. If she was wrong, she’d die. She grabbed the magic items she’d dropped, clenched them in her fist, and pressed them to his arm—to the rivulet of her blood on his arm. “
Kesser arankia
. With blood I bind.”

Carmichael screamed. The energy jolting down
the cord still connecting them jerked, it jerked and it changed, and she felt his terror, felt something swell behind it.

“
Septikosh, mellikosh, hatarosh—
”

Carmichael tried to jump off her. She grabbed him with her numb right hand, letting her blood flow faster onto his skin, and brought her left up in an arc beneath it. Her left arm, and her left hand, holding her knife.

Power exploded the second her blood hit his. His screams grew louder, higher, shrieks of agony. She thought she might have been screaming, too; she wasn’t sure, but she knew she’d stopped when he crumpled off her to the floor.

Now he was bound to her and she could feel what he was, how inhuman he was, that he’d done things, evil things, to gain power and turn himself into the spell’s master. He’d become something else, something held together and bound by magic, and that meant he was something she could destroy.

Her blood in his veins. Her power in his veins. He shrieked, his voice horrible and sharp as the others watched. He … curdled, somehow, on the floor. Like a slice of cheese left out too long, shriveling into himself as he screamed.

No time to be compassionate. She managed to catch Lex’s eye and gasp, “Time to go,” before she took the energy she still held inside her, the energy from all those people caught in the spell’s trap, and shoved it back into Carmichael as hard as she could. Shoved it into her binding, into the anti-spell she’d cobbled together, and just before the
Agneta Katina
exploded she felt the spell release its prisoners.

Blackness. Silence. Freezing cold and so dark she couldn’t breathe. She opened her mouth to scream but water rushed into it; she choked, her limbs flailing, trying to figure out— She was in the bay. She was in the bay, and she was drowning.

Trying to fight the urge to breathe, the urge to move, was like trying to fight the urge to take another pill after she’d crashed from the last dose. Almost impossible. But she did it, she forced herself to go limp, and holy fuck, it worked. She surfaced, lifting her face to the sky, and struggled, choking and gasping, to breathe.

The water in her lungs didn’t want to let her. She coughed so hard she thought she might lose those lungs altogether, that they might fly out of her mouth to join the detritus of the
Agneta Katina
rising and falling around her.

Flames rose off the surface of the water; the
Agneta
’s skeleton, wreathed in fire, groaned as it sank inch by inch. Chess searched for the cord inside her, the spell, and didn’t find it. It was gone. It was gone and she was alive. She’d done it, and she could find Terrible and they could go home, and she’d done it.

Now she just had to get back to shore, and that didn’t look like an easy distance. Her bag—holy shit, the strap was still wrapped around her, thank fuck for that one—hung off her like a corpse, her wet clothes clinging heavily to her skin.

Where was Lex? Shit, where was Lex?

She’d told him to get off the boat, but she had no idea if he’d had time to do so, if anyone had. No idea if anyone else had survived the explosion. What if— Shit, if Lex died …

Not the time to think about it, especially not when her legs and hands had started to numb out from the cold. Make it back to dry land, that was what she needed to do. She’d find Lex there, or he’d find her there, because he would
be
there. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—contemplate the idea that he wouldn’t be.

Swimming had never been an activity she’d enjoyed. Swimming in the dark waters of the bay, fragrant with dead fish and sewage, didn’t make her like it any more. Especially not when her brain refused to stop showing her images of sharks and sea monsters, of diseases that loved to breed in unclean water and were probably burrowing into her—shit, into the open wound on her arm, and whatever others she hadn’t felt yet—with her every movement.

Finally she reached the dock and climbed up onto it, scraping her hands in the process. Still no sign of Lex. She couldn’t see any of his men, either; at least, she didn’t think she could. Too many people crowded along the street, watching the
Agneta
’s corpse lower itself into the bay, for her to pick out any familiar faces.

Shit, she didn’t have her phone. She’d given it to Lex, and he— Well, he was most likely on his way back to her place, or waiting for her, maybe on the rooftop where they’d all met up earlier.

That’s where she’d head, then. Now that the spell had
ended, the fight would end, as well, so it shouldn’t be hard to— What the fuck?

The fight hadn’t ended. The fight was going on, loud and vicious, but it wasn’t Carmichael’s horde doing the fighting. It was Bump’s men. And Lex’s. They’d worked together until the threat had passed and then turned on one another. Shit.

She made her slow, cautious way along the outskirts of the battle, aware with each passing step of another ache, another injury. It felt like she’d been hit by a twenty-ton block of ice; every inch of her felt raw and tender, and all the speed had worn off, leaving her jittery and dehydrated.

And she couldn’t do more; all of her own clean drugs would be ruined from her twin dips in the bay. Fuck. She had more at home, yeah, but that didn’t help her much. She couldn’t exactly head back there right at that moment. First she needed to find Terrible, and Lex.

If she made a strange picture—stumbling through the fight, soaking wet and bloody—no one paid any attention. Fine with her. She didn’t pay much attention to the men she passed, either, except quick glances to make sure none of them were Terrible or Lex. With each step, her unease grew. Where were they? Where was Terrible, where was Lex?

They weren’t waiting at the foot of the building where they’d all been earlier; several of Bump’s men were, which made her heart skip with hope for a second, until she asked if Terrible was there and they shook their heads.

Bump was, though, still standing on the roof where she’d left him. He glanced back when he heard her shuffling footsteps.

“Ay, Ladybird, lookin like you had you a fuckin time, yay. Broken them fuckin magic all up, though, guessing.”

She nodded. “Where’s Terrible? Have you—”

He took a step back from the edge of the roof, sweeping his arm sideways in invitation. “Have you a fuckin look-see. Found heself a fuckin match, he done.”

She’d started to move before he finished the sentence. Shit, she’d forgotten. She’d actually managed to forget Devil for a few minutes there.

If only that meant he’d disappeared, instead of doing what he was doing, which was fighting with Terrible on the street below.

“Fighting” was a mild word for it. Her stomach jumped into her throat and stayed there, choking her, as she watched the two figures on the pavement. The crowd had parted for them; they moved alone in a circle empty of everything but the blood she imagined she could see even from a distance.

Of course she couldn’t. She stood four or five stories up and the only streetlight was far outside the circle. But still she thought she could, that she could see it spattered on the ground, could see it obscuring their faces and soaking into their clothes.

Devil must have found him—or vice versa—not long after Terrible had left the roof; they’d clearly been at it for a while. Both of them stumbled. Both of them moved as if their arms were too heavy, their bodies thick and slow.

But both of them still moved, and she knew they wouldn’t stop until one of them was dead.