Darkbound (The Legacy of Moonset) (14 page)

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We know Moonset believed all power had merit. That Necromancy could save lives, and Maleficia could be weaponized. We believe they learned as many as they could get their hands on.
They even sought out myths of a primordial magic, stronger than any other.

Council Report
Eyes Only

Witchers poured from the building, far more than the half-dozen that had originally appeared. The Prince was right, there were more still waiting in the wings.
The one you see has a dozen siblings lurking in the walls.
Someone had told me that once, but I was pretty sure they’d been talking about rats at the time.

Jenna and I were caught up in the evacuation, as some of the black-garbed men and women stayed behind to put out fires and check for injuries. The largest part of the force,
though, streamed outside after the Prince, who had walked casually through the wall where windows had once been. Fire alarms ran through the building, though there were no fires that I could see.

He seemed heedless of the danger he was in. I doubted he feared the Witchers even a little. The sun peeked out at the center of the sky, a sliver of light that set the building behind us alight with faint oranges and yellows.

At first it seemed like no one had noticed us, but Quinn was on top of one of the black metal benches near the door, eyes scanning the crowd. When he found us, he hopped back down and started moving through the crowd, but the Prince intercepted him first.

“No hospital staff,” Jenna said out of the corner of her mouth, her eyes trained back on the building behind us.

I turned, realizing quickly that she was right. There were
Witchers filling the parking lot, but not a single ordinary
human. Not a doctor, a nurse, even a patient. They’d evacuated the hospital already. They were
waiting
for this. “We are so out of our league,” I whispered, half to myself. Quinn knew the Prince was going to show up here. Maybe to finish what he’d started with Justin, maybe for some other reason. But he
knew.
Enough to empty the hospital during the handful of hours I was gone.

“I believe you have something of mine,” the Prince said, circling around Quinn with a dark smile.

“You’re not taking Malcolm,” Quinn replied tightly,
chin up and keeping his reactions to a minimum. He didn’t show any fear, which was good, but he still looked like he was enjoying this too much.

“Malcolm already
belongs
to me.”

Quinn snarled, and like a well-oiled machine the three dozen Witchers fell into order. Jenna tried to step in front of me, blocking me with her much smaller body until I snorted and reversed our positions. She gave me a pointed look as we jockeyed for position, and instead ended up side by side.

All of the Witchers had broken up into rings of five. Quinn was the only one who stood alone. Nick looked up at a wordless nod from Quinn. Just as the first real burst of sunlight flew over the horizon, he shouted, “Now!”

Shouts of magic punctured reality, as ice and stone and flame were summoned, each attack streaking forward just a second later than the one before. It was genius, really. No one could have dodged
all
of those attacks. To dodge one was to put yourself directly in harm’s way for the next, and the next, and so on.

Only … that was exactly what the Prince managed to do. He spun and dipped and pranced like this all was a dance, and he was the only one who was enjoying himself. The Witchers knew exactly what they were doing and had their timing down perfectly. He
shouldn’t
have been able to dodge everything they threw at him. But he did all the same.

Quinn called out directions I didn’t understand, things about gnomes and numbers that made no sense to anyone who wasn’t a Witcher. But with every command, the tactics the army displayed changed. Magical strike attacks—fire and force—were abandoned and area attacks taken up. The ground around us trembled as multiple shouts severed the land, created chasms and gashes as the blacktop concrete split apart.

The Prince continued his dance, running and sliding and evading everything that came his way. The Witchers’ attacks were controlled and careful: despite the fact that everything they threw at him missed, the collateral damage was minimal. Spells faltered and vanished before they could strike one of the hospital buildings, the light posts, even the landscaping. Only the parking lot itself was damaged, torn up and split apart like the gates to the Abyss were going to open right here.

Twice, just when it seemed that two or three attacks were going to meet with the Prince in the middle, he shimmered and vanished, only to reappear five feet to the right and completely unmarked.

Once, an attack veered wide, arcing towards both the Prince … and us. By the time we saw the spell (which was like storm clouds and purple lightning), it was too late for Jenna and me to even move. But the Prince surprised me again, darting behind and scooping us up, one in each arm. He leaped backwards, five or maybe ten feet off the ground. And despite the fact that I was the better part of six feet two inches, in his hands I was an infant who could be easily moved and carried.

“Watch yourselves,” the Prince said, the harsh current washing my features out in red and a sudden snap of anger. Shame welled up in me only long enough for me to realize that he wasn’t chastising
us
but Quinn’s soldiers. “What if you’d hit one of them?” the Prince called, sounding outraged. “You could have hurt him.”

Quinn held up a hand, and immediately the incipient magic in the air faltered and vanished, recalled back into the ether it had come from. There was an impasse, and it had everything to do with Jenna and me. The Prince’s arm was still around me, hot and disturbingly comfortable against my skin. He smelled like my favorite body wash, but on his skin the scent was somehow
more
, the most perfect version of itself. He released us, then turned to look at me, as if he’d forgotten that he was one against dozens. As if it didn’t matter.

A discordant note in the symphony flowing from the Prince’s mouth lasted only as long as his eyes on mine. The first two fingers of his right hand sliced through the air to point somewhere over his shoulder and a piercing note hit my eardrums like Charybdis itself swallowed me whole.

I had been ripped between points and from one version of the world to another so often by now that the transition hit me no harder than a bit of turbulence, but Jenna grabbed my arm in surprise.

One moment we were in the shadow of the main building hiding amidst some of the wreckage, and the next, we were on the roof of the hospital overlooking the battlefield.

There was a moment when it looked like Jenna was about to lose her dinner all over the side of the hospital, but the queasy look soon passed and she straightened.

Quinn spun around once he realized we were gone, but he and the Witchers were like ants to us, all the way up here. “Hey!” I shouted, waving my hands, but the sound didn’t carry that far. Up here, the wind was more ferocious, angry and sulking like Cole on a summer school morning.

“He wants us out of the way?” Jenna tucked some of her hair behind her ear, but the wind just whipped it out again like a wild serpent refusing to be tamed.

“I don’t think we really know anything about what he wants,” I replied. We tried the only door to be found on the roof, but it was locked from the inside, and when Jenna tried the only unlocking spell she knew, it didn’t work. Because there were so many different kinds of locks, there were an equal number of spells that each catered to a different type. And Jenna’s spell could barely jiggle the handle.

There was nothing to do but stare at the battle below us.

Someone would call out a command, and then as a unit the Witchers would lob a series of attacks, their magic rocking through the air as loud as any jet engine. So many attacks, fire and ice, lightning and force, shadows and light. Dozens of attacks, all spread out on different levels, different heights, different wavelengths. No one could escape all of it.

But that was exactly what the Prince did. He leapt through the fray with a triumphant trill, feet catching on to empty air and propelling him off the ground. Some attacks he hopped over, a few he rolled underneath, and then there were the ones where he stretched himself out until he was no more than an inch wide and slid between them.

To their credit, the Witchers never broke ranks. Each wave of attacks was just as calm and focused as the ones before.

But with each round, and the way the Prince darted around them, the Witchers shifted position. Sometimes they stepped back. Sometimes they moved for cover, as wayward magical strikes hurtled their way. It took several minutes for me to see the pattern. For me to understand why the Prince wasn’t returning any of the attacks himself. The Witchers, all thirty of them, kept inching closer to one another and none of them had realized it yet. The Prince wasn’t just dodging their attacks. He was
herding
them. And that could only mean one thing.

“Oh no,” I whispered, once I realized what was going on.

Jenna leaned over the ledge, seeing almost instantly what had taken me minutes. “He’s playing with them.” And then. “He’s going to kill them.” She grabbed for my hand, threading her fingers through mine. “Come on. We have to do something. We have to
help.
”

“What can we do?” I tried to pull my hand free, but she wouldn’t let go. “We need to stay out of it.” The image of the spell hurtling towards us, and the way the Prince had leaped into its path, rather than letting us be hurt. I wasn’t a coward by any sense of the imagination, but this wasn’t our fight. It wasn’t something we
could
fight. If it was something that wanted to kill us, then maybe we would have stood a chance. We could have used the curse for some good.

But if that spell had come any closer, it might not have been a demon of the Abyss that was destroyed by its activation, but one of the Witchers. Maybe even one of the ones we knew.

She grabbed me by the face, and I expected fury or something like it, but Jenna was calm, controlled. “Listen to me. He’s going to kill them. Quinn’s down there. Nick too. People we
know.
I know you
hate
me, and I know you hate
this
, but it’s the only thing we can do right now. We have to help them. Somehow.”

“What do you even think I’m going to be able to do?” I asked, flustered and frustrated. I didn’t know spells. I didn’t have nearly the same kind of drive that Justin and Jenna did, the hunger to unravel every spell they could find, to teach themselves everything that they could. I knew about as little as I could help, and Jenna knew that.

“We’re stronger together,” Jenna said firmly. “We’re part of the same coven, Mal. Together we’re more capable than either one of us on our own.”

I didn’t know what she expected me to do but listen. It turned out that was all she wanted.

“Close your eyes,” she said, and I did. “Feel your heartbeat. Feel the part of you that’s alive and kicking, the adrenaline that’s in your veins right now.” She took my hand in hers, pressed it against her neck. “Now feel my heartbeat. You and I, we may not share any blood, but we’re family. I’m the only one who gets to make fun of you for your demon boyfriend.”

The laughter escaped me suddenly, and it should have broken the moment between us, but it had the opposite effect. The more Jenna talked, the deeper I fell inside myself.

“There’s a cord that connects us, light like angel feathers that will stretch to the ends of the earth if it needs to.” Her voice was low and serious, the perfect voice to be hypnotized to. “And with our hands on this cord, we can access the Coven bond.

“It’s just there, it’s under the surface. The five of us are connected in a way that no one but us will ever understand. For me, the four of you are like fires burning in the distance. When I close my eyes and concentrate, I can feel you somewhere just beyond my eyelids.”

I concentrated, trying to use the sounds and feel of our heartbeats to tap into the hidden world she was referring to. But in the dark of my mind, there was nothing. No fire, no feeling. No connection to any of the others, least of all Jenna.

Her words grew hesitant, slow to regain their fire and passion. They stumbled, the truth hard against her lips. “I hate you sometimes, but Justin never will. And I hate that because someday he might decide I’m not worth fighting for anymore, and you’ll win. And some days it feels like he’s all I have, that he’s the only thing that keeps me here. I don’t know what I’ll be without him, and what’s worse is that someday I know
I’ll have to find out. We can’t be together forever.”

The confession did what Jenna’s soothing tone could not. My mouth opened, and words spilled out. “None of you know me. I play the part and give you the only mask I can, even though it’s not enough. And there’s so much fear. Sometimes I can’t push it down fast enough, it grows like weeds and the only thing I can do is drown it out with more anger. And I’m always angry, and always frustrated, and none of you will ever know why.”

And there was no time for guilt or blame, because even as I confessed to the person I trusted least in the circle, my mind expanded, like another world opening up inside my brain, a world of more than three dimensions, where light and air were the same thing. I couldn’t just feel the connection with Jenna, I could
see
it. It stretched far beyond the two of us. I could feel Justin inside the hospital, sleeping and dormant, his presence a gray node inside my head. Cole and Bailey, each slow to sleep and dreaming fitfully, bright spots even in a world that already seemed composed entirely of light.