The Lost Girl (27 page)

He had reasoned that the key to catching Nick was not trying to shoot the spell at him, like Celeste had attempted in our garden, but to form the light around him and enclose him firmly inside. Nick wouldn’t be able to escape this perfect sphere of light. The tricky part was to make the evil thing stand still long enough for me to form its prison around him. I remembered how Celeste had missed all her shots. Sneaky Nick was deviously fast.

I watched Vigil as he explained things to me, his light
jeans smeared with dirt and the white T-shirt Seth had loaned him hanging close to his body. He looked so young, so normal, his face smooth and round, his rosy, soft lips and big, round, black eyes with long eyelashes forming an angelic face.

He watched me with attentive glances as he gave me the final instructions about the light prison spell.

“OKAY. I understand, Vigil. I will go alone from this point on,” I stated, and began to make a move.

But he stopped me, protesting fiercely. “No! You promised you would take me with you. You gave me your word.” He glowered, upset.

“All right. If you feel that strongly,” I said, allowing him to follow as I walked quietly towards the cabin. It looked like a hunter’s abandoned storage hut. I tried to make as little noise as possible as I sneaked close to a broken window and made to peek inside, but a creak at the front door caught my attention and I spun around in time to catch Vigil’s hunched form hurrying into the cabin.

“Wait! No, Vigil,” I hissed, but he was already inside and out of earshot. I cursed before running to catch up with him. “Vigil, you were supposed to wait outside,” I said, exasperated, shutting the door firmly as I followed him inside. I was trying to block all escape routes; no way in hell was I going to let that sneaky bastard run away from me again.

Vigil turned to look at me, clearly confused.

“You could get hurt,” I told him with a scowl.

He made a face, realization finally dawning on him. He glanced around in panic but a clanging noise behind us made us both snap our heads to attention. Something had woken up and was stirring in the dark.

I grunted, giving up on any attempt at an ambush now. We were just too loud and obvious. It was better to go for the wild and crazy tactic, then.

There weren’t too many windows, so the cabin was in semi-darkness. Boxes, ragged sacks and rotten dusty objects were thrown everywhere. The place had been abandoned for a long time, by the looks of it.

“Come on, you little piece of trash! I’ve had enough of this. Let’s get this over with,” I shouted, walking to the center of the cabin.

Something heavy thumped on top of a crooked wooden table a few feet away from me. I could see Nick’s little paws brushing through the thick layers of dust, leaving marks as he moved.

“Gotcha!” I muttered, forming a small ball of light around Nick, exactly the way Vigil had explained to me. But as soon as the thin line started shining around him, Nick hissed violently and skipped over it as fast as lightning. The light ball formed around nothing but thin air.

There was a heavy thumping noise on the floor and a scary, throaty growl followed. Nick launched himself at me. My mind flashed in warning and I covered my face with my arm, the palm of my hand outstretched to block Nick’s attack. All I could think of was “shield”, and then, astonishingly, something wavered in the dark, glistening brightly while Nick slammed against it – an invisible shimmering wall right in front of me.

He landed heavily on the floor and jumped away, shaking his head, disoriented, while his fur short-circuited again. I could see his deformed shape in the dark now.

I prepared myself to cast another light spell but once again Nick was faster in his recovery and he jumped in
my direction, allowing no time for me to prepare another magic shield.

He landed on me, making me stumble backwards and fall straight into Vigil.

At that moment, a split second before we all hit the ground, I made a tactical battle decision.

I needed to get us out of that little hut. It was too crowded, too much junk piling up everywhere, all those boxes getting in the way with a very fragile Vigil in the middle of it all – also too many places for Nick to hide. But if Nick managed to break out of the cabin, we would have to chase him through the forest.

So I took advantage of the fact that we were already tangled around each other and pictured a place I had once seen in a photograph. It was the perfect place to handle Nick: a wide, vast and deserted place. I closed my eyes and imagined us there.

Everything felt rushed and out of focus and then we were landing on solid ground. It felt dry, hot and incredibly hard. It took me a second to adjust to the brightness of the place as I crouched next to Vigil.

I frowned at the intensity of the light and blinked rapidly, looking around to find myself in the middle of a desert. The reddish ground had millions of cracked and parched lines engraved in the scorched earth. There was dry land stretching as far as the eye could see, and nothing else. The sun burned mercilessly in a clear sky.

Vigil groaned loudly, once again feeling the disorientation and sickness from my teletransportation. I stood up fast and looked around urgently for Sneaky Nick. He had rolled a little further away from us and was looking quite sick and disoriented himself. He was trembling, too, the blazing sun
too bright for him to bear, his camouflage fur completely gone.

Nick bristled and tensed up when he sensed me walking closer to him; he cast around for a way out of this hellish place. There was no way out; dead, dry land stretched out endlessly and the scolding sun reigned imperiously in the cloudless sky.

He darted his head to each side, then clawed at the dry earth in an attempt to hide underground, but the earth was so hard and solid that he could barely make a scratch on the surface.

Then I heard Vigil gasping a little behind me, biting back a soft sob. I snapped around and saw him clutching at his forearm, blood trickling in streams through his fingers. Nick had taken a big chunk out of Vigil’s arm during our tangled struggle in the cabin. My eyes registered the wounded arm, the blood trickling down vivid red, the deepness of the cut, and then I met his eyes. That was what did it for me.

When I saw the look in Vigil’s eyes – the terror and fear marking his face, the hopeless realization of his frail human condition, his mortality, all those emotions bursting out of him like an unstoppable avalanche – something inside me snapped and I finally let go of any illusion of control.

Vigil was hurt.

I felt the chains snapping, all of them breaking free, one by one, undeniably, irrevocably free.

He was scared. Terrified. Hurt.

Something inside me snarled viciously, and ferociously. I turned my face to Nick and he reeled back when he saw the murderous look in my eyes.

“
You hurt him
,” I growled, my voice coming out all ragged. It was taking all my willpower to stay still, to
contain this fury rising inside, this burning fire running through my veins. All I saw was red, all I felt was fire, and all I heard was my heart hammering inside my chest and my thoughts drowning in anger.

I wanted to destroy him. Destroy everything.

I watched as Nick prepared to bolt, even though there was nowhere left to run. He was desperate; his irrational fear had taken over his twisted brain, making him take drastic actions. He knew he was in serious danger. He didn’t have time to make so much as a move, though, because I beamed close to him and grabbed him roughly by the scruff of the neck. He yelped and I heard Vigil shouting for me to stop, but it was too late.

No one could stop me. It was time for this filthy creature to get its deserved end. And I knew just the right place to do it.

I concentrated again, with Nick firmly under my grip.

He would not escape me again. Not this time. Not any more.

And especially not where I was planning to go. I left Vigil alone in the reddish deserted place, his urgent pleas quickly lost in time and space.

When I opened my eyes, the dark, moonless sky loomed over my head, and a glittery silver sand lay beneath my bare feet. It had been a long time since I’d visited here. Dunes and hills of warm sand spread like an ocean, and the inky sky bore down upon us like a velvety black cloak.

Sky’s desert. Death’s domain.

In the distance, sitting on top of a steep hill, was a small gothic-looking girl, watching over us with curious
eyes. Sky didn’t show any sign of wanting to approach us and just stood still, watching from her silvery mount far away.

I tossed Nick hard onto the sand and watched him tremble and squirm under my gaze.

“You will never hurt anyone I love again, you filthy thing,”
I said, deadly resolution ringing in my voice.
“Do you know where you are?”
I spat out.

He looked around, bewildered, trying to understand what was happening. He seemed genuinely at a loss.

“Do you know who she is?”
I said, turning to gesture at Sky sitting on her silver sand hill.

Nick wasn’t clueless any more. The moment he laid eyes on Sky, he flinched, the fur of his back rising, his yellow eyes wide in fear. He knew who she was.

He knew what was going to happen to him.

He tossed himself at my feet, trembling and crying out in despair. “Pleassse, please, graciouss witch! Sspare me! Take pity on me, pleasse!” he begged, rolling around in the sand. “I promissse I’ll leave you be; I’ll leave all your friendss in peace. Pleasse, don’t kill me!”

“Oh, I am not worried about you any more. I don’t even have to do anything. All I have to do is leave you here. There is no way out of this place; but you already know that.”
I growled menacingly.
“I will leave you here and soon there will be a sun rising right above those hills,”
I said, pointing behind him.
“And when the sun comes, it will burn more than anything you’ve ever felt in your life; it will turn the air into fire; it will scorch everything in its path, blazing and merciless. It will turn you into ashes, into silvery sand. There is no escape from the heat of this sun.”

As soon as I finished explaining, a light glow started to rise over the hills.
His doom was coming. The sun was rising.

“You don’t have much time,”
I told him.
I wanted to watch him burn. I wanted to see him suffer and die.

He panicked and started scraping at the ground, trying to dig, to hide beneath the sand.

“NO!”
I shouted, and stomped my foot on the sand. A blasting wave of heat exploded with the impact, and the energy unleashed made the sand crinkle and turn into smoldering glass, like a glittery, melting wave spreading for miles around.

The sand turned into glass all around him and Nick jumped in the air. When he landed again, his paws scrambled over the smooth, shiny surface.

“You cannot hide from this, creature. That sun will burn you; it will ignite you whole, flesh, bones and soul. There is no escape and I will not let you hide any more. I want to see you burn,”
I told him furiously.

“Pleasse, benevolent witch, pleasse, ssspare me! You can take me away from here! I’ll do anything you want! I’ll give you anything you need!”

I stopped and mused over his pathetic trembling form. I needed to know. I reached inside my pocket and extended the dark glass ball for him to see.

“Do you know what this is?”
I asked. He cowered beneath his paws, dreading the mortal sunlight that threatened to rise in the distance. He glanced up and frowned at the ominous dark glass ball.

“Y-yess, it’ss the—” and then he stopped abruptly, understanding dawning on him.

“You sswitched! You sswitched with him! You have hiss
powerss! I knew no witch could be thiss powerful!” he exclaimed.

“How does it work?”
I asked impatiently.
“How do I make it switch back?”

He frowned again, trying to understand the question.

“Tick tock. You are running out of time.”

He looked at the rising sun and back to me, panic filling his face as he shrank into a tiny ball just as the sun started peeking its first burning rays over the hills.

The sun rose and the blasting heat rolled off it in a hellish wave towards us, turning the air into molten lava.

“Y-you havess to repeat again, do the same thingss you did the firsst time when you triggered the magic ball. You have to do it again, the exact ssame way!” he shouted, terrified.

“I already have. It didn’t work.”

“It’ss the only way, I sswears! You have to do it again! You missed something. I wass there, I remember! You have to do it again, the lightss, the nightss, the blood on your handss, the rainss, the two of you together. That’s the only way. I swearss! Pleassse, hag. Pleasse, have mercy!”

My eyes widened.
Nick was right
. We’d missed a lot of things. We hadn’t repeated everything we needed to repeat. We’d missed the rain, the light, the night and especially the blood on my hands, the blood of my wounded leg. That was why the glass ball hadn’t worked again. We did it all wrong.

“Please, ssave me now. You promissed!” he bawled, as the sun rose fiercely in the sky. Nick heaved and choked as the heat burned his throat.

“I didn’t promise you anything,”
I said in disgust.

A big part of me wanted to watch him die. But a small piece of me couldn’t. I ignored the trashing and snarling
inside my mind, urging me to strike down and destroy everything, and instead I lifted my hand and formed the light ball prison-lock spell around Nick, enclosing him safely inside. I waved my hand up and the ball floated into the air in front of me. The light sphere shrank to the size of a marble and I pocketed it in my jeans. Then I turned to watch as the blazing sun rose completely.

It was an alien sun, rays of red, orange and vivid bright yellow bursting around its blinding white center. It was mesmerizing: a destructive, merciless, unstoppable force. A thing of beauty and power, something to worship and respect.