The Darkest Magic (A Book of Spirits and Thieves) (4 page)

“Lower your voice,” Jackie hissed. “She might hear you.”

“Good, I hope she does.” Crys hesitated then. Her bluntness was usually a good thing—in her opinion—but even she knew that sometimes she could be too harsh. And she didn’t want to chase after a butterfly with a baseball bat, especially not now. “Look,” she said. “I don’t mean to be a bitch. Well,
mostly
I don’t. But I’m sick of waiting around for something to happen, for life to go back to normal around here. Or is normal life just an impossible wish at this point?”

Jackie twisted a long piece of blond hair around her index finger. “I promise that I have a plan.”

“Oh? And what is it?”

“I understand that you’re anxious and want answers, but, Crys, it’s only been a week. And Dr. Vega is still working with the book.”

“I know. Okay? I know that.” Crys started pacing back and forth, not even taking a sip of her pop, instead trying to focus on the feel of the surface condensation on the can to help cool her off a bit. Her frustration had a tendency to grow so intense that it just exploded, like fireworks. Or a bomb. People anywhere near her might get hurt, including herself. “You’ve been avoiding her,” she said finally.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Yes, you have.”

Jackie sighed. “I hate that you know the truth about me now. I hate that anyone knows it.”

“Which part of the truth? That you were madly in love with Markus King? That you still are?”

Her eyes went wide. “Is that what you think? That my life is some kind of romance novel come to life? That I was just some cliché of a naive teenage girl falling for a powerful immortal? That I’m
still
that cliché?”

“Yes, actually. You should write it all down. You could make millions. Those kinds of stories sell like crazy.”

“How wrong you are. How horribly wrong.”

Crys flinched at Jackie’s reaction, but she quickly regained her sharp composure. She felt she was close to a truth that hadn’t yet been shared. “When you called him that night, when he had Becca and me, it was like he forgot everything except you,” she said. “He probably forgot his own name. He handed the Codex over to Dad like it was a box of tissues, like it wasn’t important to him at all. If you have that effect on him, all these years later . . . There’s obviously something still there.”

Jackie’s cheeks flushed bright pink—but not from embarrassment. A look of sheer outrage clouded her face. “That man murdered my grandmother. He murdered my parents. He stole our family’s fortune. And you think I still have a
thing f
or him?”

Like a threatening storm cloud that had decided to show mercy, Crys lost her bluster. “I’m not saying it isn’t complicated,” she said quietly.

“He marked me, Crys. I was sixteen years old, and he carved symbols into my flesh with a knife to make sure that I did anything he told me to. I looked at him with awe, this handsome man who made time for
me
. Thousands of years separated us, but he looked no more than five years older than me. He took me into his confidence. And yes, I believed I loved him. Hell, maybe I did, for a time. But our . . . relationship wasn’t natural—it was forged out of magic. Out of coercion. Do you see how messed up that is?” She thrust her forearm, bare and clear of any scars or blemishes, toward Crys. Crys knew how Markus’s magic worked, that he could heal the dagger’s marks as soon as he made them, leaving no trace behind. “I had no choice but to do as he said,” Jackie went on. “Whether I truly believed at the time that I actually wanted him, that I actually loved him, makes no difference. I was under his influence, and he used me. For that, I can never forgive him. For that, I’ll always hate him.”

“I’m sorry,” Crys said. It was all she could say—even though she did want to congratulate Jackie for making her feel like a complete ass in record time.

“So am I. Believe me. But I’m not sorry that Becca exists. If there’s one good thing that came out of that twisted relationship, it was her. But he can never know that she’s his daughter. For her own safety.”

“Agreed.” Crys worked all of this over in her head as she took a
shaky sip of her drink. “I know it’s not easy for you to talk about, but . . . Jackie, he was
visibly
distracted when he learned you were on the phone. He still has feelings for you.”

“Perhaps,” Jackie admitted reluctantly, but in a tone that told Crys she wasn’t surprised. “And perhaps I can use those feelings against him. If I need to.”

“What did you say to him on that phone call?”

Jackie blinked, regarding Crys with her arms crossed tightly over her chest.

“Jackie, please,” Crys said after a short silence.

“I told him that I know his magic is fading. That he needs the book, this book he’s been obsessing over for years. He thinks it will make him the god his society believes he is. I told him that if he comes anywhere near me or my family, I would tear the pages from it one by one and burn them all. I didn’t know he had it in his possession at the time.”

“Oh,” Crys said. She was looking at her aunt with growing awe. “I imagined that conversation going a totally different way.”

“I’m sure you did.” Her aunt’s expression remained uncharacteristically grim. “Luckily, the book is with us now.”

Julia Hatcher entered the kitchen carrying two plastic bags, interrupting them. “What’s going on in here?” she said, eyeing her sister and daughter warily.

“The usual,” Jackie said. “Your daughter is grilling me to make sure my loyalties lie with the family instead of my true and everlasting love, Markus King.”

Julia nodded. “Good for her.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Julia’s cell phone rang, and she scrambled to pull it out of her pocket.

“Hello?” After a pause, she glanced at Jackie and Crys. “I’ll be right back,” she said, leaving the room.

Crys began to put out the contents of the shopping bags. Three bags of potato chips, a large package of M&Ms, a variety of frozen meals, and two plastic containers of sushi. She eyed the sushi with equal parts disgust and gratitude.

Her mother was trying to make her happy. With convenience-store sushi, but still.

“So you really had no choice back then,” Crys said quietly to Jackie. “You
had
to do what he said, like . . . like some kind of puppet.”

“It didn’t feel like that,” Jackie said without a pause. “At the time, when I was doing those things, it felt like I had free will. Like I
wanted
to be doing them. But looking back at it . . . I know I didn’t.”

Absently, Crys pressed her hand against her ribs, still bound with bandages and sore from where one of Markus’s minions had kicked and beaten her, all while Farrell looked on without stopping him.

Ugh.
The absolute last person in the world Crys wanted to spend any time thinking about was Farrell Grayson. He was a rich kid from a family of Hawkspear members, known for his misdeeds and arrests more than anything else. He wasn’t a nice guy even before he was a society member, even before he received his marks. But now he was really bad news. He’d recently tried to get close to Crys—but only because Markus had ordered him to. Crys had been poking around the society, trying to find out secrets about Markus and her father in case it might help save Becca.

And, unfortunately for her, before she found out that every time his lips moved it was either because there was a cigarette between them or he was lying, she’d really started to like Farrell.

Crys was ashamed at how easily he’d been able to manipulate her, which was why she’d kept the details of their brief association
mostly to herself. But even now, if she were honest, she still found herself wanting to make excuses for everything Farrell did and all he lied about. She’d catch herself blaming what he’d done on his marks—after all, they were the same marks Jackie once had, before her aunt became pregnant with Markus’s half-immortal child, when they’d become null and void.

But despite all that, Crys always came back to the one sure thing she knew about Farrell: Some of the things he’d done were unforgiveable.

“I’m going out on the balcony,” Jackie said, thankfully pulling Crys out of her unwanted memories. “I need some air.”

Crys offered her a bag of potato chips. “Hungry?”

“No.” But she grabbed them anyway and left the kitchen just as Julia returned.

“I found something, Crys,” Julia said. “You’ve been hiding things from me.”

Her stomach sank. What was she in trouble for now?

“What?”

“This.” Julia pulled a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket. Crys recognized it immediately: the flyer advertising a photography show at a nearby gallery, which she’d thrown away when she’d cleaned out her purse earlier that morning. “Andrea Stone. She’s your favorite photographer, isn’t she?”

Andrea Stone was known for her portraits. She traveled the world to find her subjects, none of them models or professionals. Real people with interesting faces, wrinkles, moles, warts, and all. Her work had been featured more than a dozen times on the cover of
National Geographic
, and Crys had every issue in her personal collection.

Favorite photographer
was putting it mildly.
Primary inspiration
and
idol
? That was more like it.

“I’m surprised you know that,” Crys said quietly, taking the flyer from her.

“Maybe I know more about you than you think I do.”

“That’s kind of scary.”

Julia grinned. “The show is ending soon.”

“I know. But unfortunately I can’t go. It’s just that I’d much rather stay here and play Monopoly or stare blankly at the walls for hours on end.”

“Nope. Think again. You’re going, and I’m coming with you. Tomorrow.”

Crys snapped her head up and met her mom’s gaze. “I’m sorry, I must have you confused with someone else. I thought you were my overprotective mother who loves rules and would never risk my safety for something as silly as the chance to view the life-changing work of my one true career role model.”

“I am your overprotective mother, and I’m taking you to this photography show.”

Crys’s heart skipped a beat. For the first time in quite a while, a genuine, goofy grin broke out on her face. But it fell almost as quickly as it arrived. “What about Markus?” she said. “Aren’t you afraid he might find us?”

Julia sighed. “I believe that Markus is able to find us whenever he likes, wherever we are.”

That was a deeply unsettling thought. “Are you serious?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Still, the security is better here than back at the shop—for now, anyway. But I swear to God, if he decides to show his ancient face and ruin something I damn well know you’ve been looking forward to, I will personally claw his eyes out.”

Crys regarded her mother with nothing short of shock. “I think that’s the most badass thing you’ve ever said.”

“From you, I’ll take that as the highest compliment. Our stay here is only temporary. It was never a safe haven, that’s not why we came here. We have the book, and Jackie is ready to destroy it if necessary. Markus knows that. He’s weak. Dying. He wouldn’t dare make a move against us unless he already had the book in his hands.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Cautious now, are we?” Julia said, a smile reappearing on her face and her eyes sparkling with mischief. “Come on, let’s break out of this dump and go to the show tomorrow. What do you say?”

Crys could barely believe this was really happening. “Um. I say
hell yes
!”

“Jackie!” Dr. Vega shouted from the study. “Julia! Come here immediately. The book—THE BOOK!”

Her excitement about the show disappearing all at once, Crys pulled Jackie off the balcony, and both of them rushed after Julia to the study.

“What’s wrong?” Jackie demanded. “What happened?”

Dr. Vega looked up at them, his wide eyes magnified behind his thick, round glasses. “The book is changing.”

“What do you mean,
changing
?”

“Right as I studied this page, the text . . . shifted. It
changed
. Right before my eyes!” He shuffled through a stack of photocopies, picking one and jabbing his finger at it. “Look! Here is a photocopy of this very page.”

They drew closer. Crys looked from the photocopy to the leather-bound Codex, which lay open on the desk. At the center of both the photocopy and the original page was an illustration of a plant bearing purple flowers. But the text—both the format and the individual words—now varied wildly between the two, and at
the very top of the book page, where there was once nothing but black-and-white writing, was a new illustration of a sun.

“Um. Is the sun . . . glowing?” Crys whispered as the black ink shifted to a golden shade, and light began to emanate from the parchment as if illuminated from within the fibers of the paper itself.

“What’s going on?”

Crys’s gaze shot to the doorway, where Becca now stood, still wrapped in her fuzzy blue bathrobe.

Her eyes were full and glowing with the same golden light.

BECCA

O
ne of Angus’s many books was a dream encyclopedia. Becca leafed through it, hoping to find some answers about her recent nightmares. She’d wanted to dream about Maddox since she’d returned from Mytica, but the nightmare Crys had woken her from had been too real, too violent, too horrible. Her hands still shook from it.

But then she felt it—something else entirely.

It was a sensation deep inside of her, an urgency she couldn’t ignore. Something was drawing her out of the library, down the stairs, and before she knew it she stood at the doorway to the study without even knowing why she was there.

“What’s going on?” she asked, but even to herself, her voice sounded dreamy and faraway.

Her family and Dr. Vega all looked at her, expressions of surprise on their faces.

She wasn’t sure if they answered her or not, because suddenly all she could see was the book.

The Bronze Codex.

She hadn’t seen it since the night she woke up back in Toronto,
Markus King, her father, and Crys standing over her. She’d been so out of it then that she hadn’t been able to register much. All she could do was blindly obey when Crys told her to run.

Since then, everyone had been treating her with kid gloves. And it didn’t take psychic abilities for her to get the funny feeling that she was the main topic of hushed conversation in their temporary lodging. Her family and Dr. Vega spoke in whispers, and whenever Becca entered a room, they’d go quiet and look guilty. She tried very hard not to let it bother her, but how could it not?

Becca Hatcher: the crazy girl who claimed her spirit went on vacation to another world. Was that how they saw her?

Brain fuzzy, gaze locked on the leather-bound book, she stood there in the threshold for what felt like a very long time.

It’s calling to me
, she thought suddenly.
It wanted me to come here.

“
Becca?
” came the sound of her name, but it was soft, like an echo underwater.

Did anyone else even realize how beautiful the Codex was? From the moment the book had arrived at the Speckled Muse, she’d felt an inexplicable but nonetheless immediate connection with it. She couldn’t read its language—not in the traditional sense, at least. She didn’t know what it was that day, of course, but she’d still felt oddly—
how to explain it?—protective
of it.

That feeling had never entirely gone away, but right now it was stronger than ever before.

That book belonged to her, no one else.

“Becca, I’m seriously going to slap you if you don’t say something.”

“Don’t say that, Crys.”

“Mom, look at her. She’s, like, possessed or something.”

“Becca, honey.” Becca barely felt her aunt touch her shoulder,
but the pressure was enough to make her raise her chin and see Jackie at her side, peering at her warily. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Becca murmured. “But you should know, there’s a spirit trapped in the hawk.”

“Okay, now she’s seriously talking crazy,” Crys said.

Ignoring her sister, she focused on a memory of Maddox using his magic to pull a dark and violent spirit away from her. He’d trapped that spirit in a piece of metal—the bronze hawk on the cover of the Codex.

With the spirit trapped inside of it, the metal had given off an aura so bone-chillingly cold it felt as if it could freeze her very soul.

But today the book ushered in a warming sensation. An aura that felt welcoming.
Sparkly
, even, like a pleasant shiver down one’s spine. The sensation shifted to an image: somewhere that was big, vast, and endless, sprawling over miles. Hundreds, thousands of miles.

Rolling meadows of green grass, jewel-like flowers of every shade and size, and a city made from crystal that sparkled like diamonds under the sun . . .

In three swift, thudding motions, Dr. Vega slammed the Codex shut, dropped it in a desk drawer, and locked it with a key.

She felt a cold pain hit her, as if an elastic band had suddenly snapped inside her brain, and she gasped. After the pain cleared, her mind finally did the same, and she looked up at her family with a wide, wondering gaze.

“Thank God.” Crys sighed. Her face was pale and drawn. “No more glowy eyes. I don’t like the glowy eyes at all. It’s not a good look for you.”

“My eyes were glowing?” Becca asked, her throat thick.

“Like lightbulbs from hell.”

The haze was gone, but something else had replaced it—an intense need to see the book again. To touch it, to hold it. It was like an itch that needed to be scratched.

Julia hushed Crys and helped Becca into a nearby chair. She pushed the blond hair off of her daughter’s forehead and smiled at her.

“Well, that was rather dramatic, wasn’t it?” Julia glanced over at Jackie. “What do you make of it?”

Jackie just watched them, her expression troubled, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. “I wish like hell I knew.”

“Perhaps we should ask Becca herself,” suggested Dr. Vega.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Jackie replied.

Becca glared at her. She couldn’t help it. She loathed when people talked about her—or worse, spoke
for
her—as if she weren’t even there.

She’d only met Dr. Vega yesterday, but she liked him quite a lot. She knew how Crys felt about him—that he was abrupt, scatterbrained, and perhaps a little too eccentric—but Becca thought he was kind of funny. He wanted to learn much more about her experience with the book, but Jackie and Julia—
and
Crys—had told him she still needed some time to recover before he could grill her about it. She appreciated that Dr. Vega didn’t look at her like she was just a fifteen-year-old kid; the couple of times he’d talked to her so far, she’d felt respected. Like a peer.

Then again, maybe it was more like a lab rat
. She thought of him slamming the Codex in the desk drawer just moments ago. Perhaps it was too soon to tell whose side Dr. Vega was on.

“I do think it’s a good idea,” Becca said to Jackie. “I want to help if I can. The more you learn about that book, the better you’ll be able to figure out why it has these effects on me, right? And why it doesn’t seem to have any effect on anyone else.”

“You are exactly right,” Dr. Vega said, giving her a toothy grin. He pushed his glasses up higher on his nose, then reached for a pen and notebook. “Excellent. Let’s begin.”

Julia shook her head. “I don’t know. Are you sure you feel up to this, Becca?”

Her mother was actually giving her a choice in the matter. That was new. And appreciated. “Yes. Seriously, Mom, I want to help.”

Jackie and Julia shared a concerned look.

“All right,” Julia said. “But promise you’ll stop if it gets to be too much, okay?”

“Promise.” Becca shifted in her seat. “Where should I start, Dr. Vega? At the beginning, when my spirit left my body and went to another world? Or start from just a couple of minutes ago when that book turned me into a zombie?”

Vega raised his bushy brows. “Is that what it felt like to you? That you were a zombie?”

She thought back. “All I know is that I was upstairs in the library, reading, and then, suddenly, I was here. Like my legs were thinking for themselves. So
zombie
might be the wrong word, but . . . it also feels pretty accurate.” Becca paused, not sure if putting this strange experience into words made her feel more relieved or more nervous. She looked up at Crys. “You said my eyes were glowing?”

“Yeah,” said Crys, and Becca was both surprised and grateful that she didn’t follow that up with a snarky joke this time.

Dr. Vega scribbled something down in his notebook, then sent a cautious glance at Julia and Jackie, both of whom stared at Becca with a perturbed look in their eyes. “May we continue?” he said.

Julia twisted her hands. “Yes. Please do. We all need to know more.”

He nodded solemnly. “All right, Becca. I have previously
hypothesized that this book is the gateway to another world. And from what little I know of your experience, you can confirm that. Yes?”

“Well, yes”—Dr. Vega beamed—“and no.” And just like that, the doctor’s face fell again. Becca went on. “When I was . . . away, I learned that the book contained magic spells from a race of immortal beings.”

The statement would have been met with disbelief anywhere else, but here it was different.

“Like Markus,” Julia said under her breath uneasily. Jackie remained silent.

“Immortal beings who dwell in another world called . . .” Vega flipped through his previous notes excitedly. Becca was about to help him out when the professor looked up, eyes wide. “Mytica.”

Becca nodded. “I got the impression that most of the immortals live in
another
world, an entirely different one set apart from where I was. There were only two immortals in Mytica while I was there. The people thought of them as goddesses.”

Vega scribbled away furiously
.
“And both of those goddesses—did they practice magic?”

“Well, I only saw one of them.” She remembered the horrible demon with the face of an angel. “Valoria. It’s said she has the powers of earth and water. The one I never saw is the goddess of the South. Cleiona. She does magic with fire and air.”

Vega’s eyes grew wider, full of amazement. “Elemental magic, yes. How absolutely fascinating! You saw some of this magic at work?”

Becca nodded. “Valoria . . . she could control snakes. She could turn people into plants.” She shivered. “She could . . . she could summon this kind of mud, and it would pull you right down to your death. And . . . and when Maddox was
this close
to defeating her, she turned herself into a funnel of water and escaped. I was there. I saw it.”

“Maddox? And Maddox is . . . ?”

Becca chewed her bottom lip. “He’s . . . a boy. From Mytica. He’s about sixteen years old and he also has magic, but it’s not like the goddesses’. It was . . . uh . . .
death magic
is what they called it. His father called him a
necromancer
, which is why he could see and talk to me. He was the only one who could. His father is a regular man, but his mother is an immortal.”

Becca took a sidelong peek and saw Jackie and Julia exchange a grave look. She wondered if they believed her now, or if, like Crys, they thought her story was nothing more than a vivid dream brought on by a coma.

It happened
, she assured herself.
It was real. Maddox was real.

He
is
real.

Shaking off any concerns about whether or not her family believed her, she continued. “Valoria had the Bronze Codex there. Except they called it something else—the Book of the Immortals. Valoria needed Maddox’s magic to work a spell that would open a gateway to our world, where another immortal had been exiled. She wanted to get to our world so she could get to this man, who had stolen a golden dagger from her that she wanted back.”

“Markus,” Jackie breathed. “The dagger.
His
dagger. That’s where it came from.”

Becca nodded. “Markus is immortal, so he can read the language the book is written in. Which means he also knows how to use the magic in it.”

Once again, the conclusion seemed too simple, too plain: The Bronze Codex was simply a book of spells. Why, then, did this little feeling that it was so much more than that keep gnawing at Becca deep inside?

“Well,” Crys said, nodding, and Becca knew that her vacation
from sarcasm was over. “I think it was really
swell
of your new boyfriend to toss the book into our world. It’s kind of cute, really. Like Toronto is his own private garbage can for hazardous magical materials. And there’s a spirit trapped in it too? Awesome!”

Becca glared at her. “As if you even believe anything I’ve said.”

Crys shrugged, a bit sheepishly. “Hey, I saw some stuff too. While you were gone. I believe it’s all
possible
.”

“Really? You don’t even believe in tarot cards.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Have we moved on to a broader discussion of paranormal hocus-pocus in general? What’s next on the list? Ouija boards?”

Becca kept her mouth shut. She knew exactly which button Crys was trying to press: A few years ago, on Halloween, they’d found an old Ouija board in the attic and decided to ask it questions at midnight.

A believer in the supernatural from the beginning, Becca had asked if the bookstore really was haunted and what the spirits wanted. Crys had secretly moved the planchette to spell out
K-I-L-L
, and Becca freaked out. So much that she’d locked herself in the bathroom for an hour.

At the time, and because it had been such a “Becca” thing to do, Crys had found it hilarious.

“All right, all right,” Dr. Vega said. “That’s enough. Becca, this is all so fascinating. Now, can you tell me: In Mytica, who, exactly, has access to elemental magic? Is it just these two goddesses, or are there others?”

“Um, well, no, actually.” Becca shot a quick glare at Crys before turning to Dr. Vega and pressing on. “There are also witches that can use elemental magic. But they have a much weaker hold on it.”

“Witches! My goodness.” He jotted down more notes, shaking his head as his pen flew across the page. “Fascinating. It’s all so, so
fascinating
. I wish my father could be here to hear this! Finally, his life’s work is coming to fruition. We’re finally getting some answers about this book.”

“All we really know about it is it’s dangerous,” Jackie snapped. She got up and moved toward the desk. “Too dangerous to be here—especially near Becca. Give me the book, Uriah.”

“Jackie . . .”

“
I’m
the one who stole it and sent it here. I take full responsibility for that thing being here in the first place. For everything it did to Becca. Give it to me. Please.”

He hesitated for a long, tense moment before relenting. He unlocked the drawer, opened it, and gave one last pleading look to Jackie before pulling out the book. Becca inhaled sharply. While she’d felt its strange pull while it had been locked away, now that she could see it, that magnetic sensation had ramped way up. She forced herself to stay in place and not immediately go to it.