The Warlock's Curse (57 page)

And strangely, Will found that he agreed.

Seizing a piece of glass from the floor, he slashed himself with it, rubbed blood between his hands. Power surged within him, as if his whole being had been charged with electricity. He lifted his hand, and brilliant force gushed in a crackling torrent from the very center of his palm. Royce staggered back, unable to withstand the enormity of the onslaught.

Ma’am shrieked ferociously, and made a gesture of terrible violence.

Her attack made Will feel as though he were shattering into a million pieces. Ma’am’s magic was infinitely more powerful than anything Royce had been able to muster, or Phleger even. It was an insane kind of power, wild and primal and heedless, like thundersnow and earthquakes and towering waves. Will could not perceive any end to it.

The world tumbled around him. He could not tell if he was standing or falling. That power would break him, like being crushed beneath huge ancient stones. Cowdray screamed,
WHORE OF A
K
ENDALL!
and tried to lash out, but Ma’am’s power constrained the vile old spirit easily. It tightened around Will like vines, like roots, choking him. He felt himself being smothered—so quickly and easily overpowered. Panic gripped him.

“Ma’am,” Will gasped. “No!”

Ma’am blinked.

Her eyes remained black, but she had heard him.
Ma’am
had heard him. She put her hands over her mouth.

“Will—” she whispered.

In that moment of opportunity, Will struck. He did not know why he did it—was it Cowdray? But power surged within him, pure reflexive power, unbidden, uncontrolled. Every ounce of force within his body surged against his mother. And all around her, everything caught fire. Every book, every scrap of paper, every broken splintered shard of wood, every tumbled bit of debris, burst into brimstone-blue flame, all consuming, flaring up with unearthly intensity.

His mother fell.

It took Will several moments to come back to himself, and in those moments the fire spread with devastating speed, billowing up the walls, licking the tin ceiling. Thick black smoke choked the air. Glowing embers fell like rain.

“Will!” Father’s voice, coming from somewhere within the black smoke and chaos.

Covering his mouth and nose with the fabric of his sleeve, Will staggered across the room toward the sound of his father’s cry, stumbling over ruined furniture and shattered glass. With a horrible cracking sound, a large beam of the roof collapsed in a fountain of sparks, and the blue flames rose to consume it with fresh intensity. The heat drove Will back, and he reached into himself for magic, for anything he could use to help—but the magic was no longer at his command. There was nothing left inside him. He was empty, bled dry.

The heat drove him back, step by agonizing step, toward the open window, toward the cold clear night air and the wildly whipping snow, toward the perfect darkness in which no moon showed.

Epilogue

N
EW MOON

O
n New Year’s Day, an enormous crowd began gathering for the premiere of
The Warlock’s Curse
well before sunrise. After the ball dropped in Times Square, the throngs pushed their way down 44th, jamming the narrow street in front of the Belasco Theater. They came even though it was snowing heavily—in freakish, unaccountable amounts. They came, drawn by the stark, enormous headlines that had dominated the front pages of all the newspapers for the past two days:

F
IRE RAZES THE
S
TANTON
I
NSTITUTE
. H
UNDREDS
K
ILLED.
S
OPHOS
D
READNOUGHT
S
TANTON
—
DEAD
.

The headlines were of sufficient enormity that they had pushed even the most titillating reports of Brother Phleger’s horrifying mental collapse (which had been broadcast to tens of thousands of homes live on the Teslaphone) below the fold.

Everyone, all the hundreds and hundreds of people waiting outside the theater in the driving snow, wore black.

Everyone except one young man, who did not have any black clothes to put on. He had only burned and dirty ones, stiff with so many kinds of blood he’d lost count. As he pushed his way through the crowd to the door of the theater, press-camera flashbulbs—aimed at some more important personage—exploded around him. The young man cringed like a repulsive crawling thing from which a rock had been lifted away.

It should have been difficult to sneak into the theater with so many people clamoring for entrance and so many Edison Studios representatives guarding the doors. But the young man merely rubbed a few drops of blood between his fingers, muttered bile-bitter words under his breath, and the theater ushers and publicity representatives turned their heads the other way as he passed. He hated the blood, hated the charms—but he was discovering that they could be useful.

The young man knew only what he had read in the newspapers. Dreadnought Stanton was dead.
That must mean Father is dead
, he thought. Because there was no real Dreadnought Stanton, only a name on a page, soon to be a picture on a screen. He did not know if Ma’am was dead, because the papers didn’t say anything about her. But he knew that Mrs. Zeno was dead. And Royce ... well, the young man found that he didn’t care what had become of Royce.

The newspapers reported that the Institute had burned with an unearthly flame that all the city’s firefighters, working in shifts, had not been able to extinguish. The blue flames had raged for days until everything, everything had been consumed—leaving nothing but baked earth.

But the young man did not need the newspapers to tell him that. He had watched the Institute burn with his own eyes, blue and purple flares shooting from the roof like fireworks.

W
ELL DONE
, Cowdray had said, admiringly.

The moon was dark, and the young man had more control over Cowdray than at any time during the month. So when Cowdray had spoken, the young man had sunk his teeth into his own arm, hard enough to draw blood. He had given Cowdray the pain. And Cowdray had winced, and stored another grudge to be paid back when the moon was full again. But the young man wasn’t ready to think about the moon being full again. He wasn’t sure he wanted to live that long.

The young man didn’t know where Jenny was, but he felt certain that Mrs. Zeno had been right. It was better that he didn’t know.

And he didn’t know where Ben was, either. The young man reached into his pocket and withdrew a crumpled piece of stationery.
Ex Fide Fortis,
read the scroll clutched in the eagle’s dirty claw.
From Faith, Strength
. Midnight had passed. The world had rung in a new year. Perhaps there would be new writing on it.

But it was still completely blank, front and back.

“Do you want some candy?” It was a girl asking him this, a girl standing behind the refreshment counter. She was dressed in a tidy white apron, and she had a round, soft face framed by shining brown curls. The young man stared at her for a moment. She was looking at his scorched and ragged clothes—but her eyes were filled with sympathy, not contempt. She smiled at him, leaned in a little closer. Her hair smelled like flowers.

“I’ve got plenty,” she whispered. “I’ll give you some.”

She bent down behind the counter, and as she did the young man felt suddenly angry. Why should she be able to smile like that? Quickly, he snaked a hand into her till and grabbed all the paper money he could. By the time she had risen, a box of chocolates in her hand, he had vanished into the crowd.

He stuffed the money into his pocket and climbed the stairs to the balcony, climbing all the way to the back row, high enough almost to touch the coffered ceiling set with octagons of stained glass. He did not take a seat, but rather pressed his back against the wall. While the theater’s deep stage had been fitted with a special projection screen of Edison’s own design, it was not a very good place to see the picture. But he didn’t need to see it. He knew the story.

Still, he watched as it all unfolded on the screen. The story of a farmboy, possessed by a devil, his face bisected into halves.
Good and evil. The celluloid images flickered, silver shadows on a silver screen. He watched the farmboy destroy the girl he loved—ah, but no, in the movie she was saved. They were both saved. They were saved, and redeemed, and blessed, and they lived happily ever after.

In the audience, people were crying.

But in the balcony, the young man was crying the hardest of them all.

Acknowledgements

T
he publication of
The Warlock’s Curse
was funded by 249 Kickstarter backers from all over the world. Each and every one has my heartfelt thanks. Their support and encouragement has made me feel a whole lot better about this strange, sprawling multigenerational saga that I've got rattling around inside my head. The idea that people other than myself might find the Stanton/Edwards clan of interest makes it
slightly
less annoying when I wake up in the middle of the night having to scribble down some obscure detail of the family's magical intrigues that I’ve just “remembered”.

As always, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my family and friends. Writing, funding, producing, and publishing this book ended up being a demanding full-time job. Considering that I already
have
a full-time job, it left precious little of me to go around. Without the patience and good humor of my husband Dan and my daughter Nora,
The Warlock’s Curse
would never have seen the light of day. They have always supported me, sometimes in ways I didn’t recognize or appreciate at the time. They have my eternal devotion and adoration.

Finally, I want to thank my mom. Because I don’t think I’ve thanked her in a book yet, and I think it’s about goddamn time.

Thanks, Mom.

Kickstarter Sponsors

— S
OPHOS
L
EVEL
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PONSORS
—
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