‘It’s dangerous.’
Steph had walked them through it. Amanda had only understood half of it, liked less than that but had no other options.
Now she was sitting cross-legged opposite Steph. The girl was in her sleeping bag, books and artefacts strewn around her like a magpie in her nest.
Amanda’s palms were sweating in her gloves, stinging the burn on her wrist, but she didn’t dare take them off. Sweat tickled down her spine beneath the layers of clothing. She had to fight to keep her attention on seeing her daughter again rather than desperately find an excuse to stop.
Caleb was shivering against the table, ankles crossed and hands tucked into his armpits, watching over them. His small eyes kept moving from Amanda to Steph and back again, betraying his nerves.
Skeebs was cocooned in his sleeping bag, shivering and grunting in turns.
‘After the knife we’re a bit past that, aren’t we?’ said Amanda. ‘Dangerous how?’
A long string of neon pink nylon retrieved from Steph’s rucksack dangled between the girl’s bare thumb and forefinger. What she needed to do required more dexterity than Caleb’s overlarge gloves would allow. The skin on the back of her right hand was pink and tender looking from the fire.
‘I’ll be opening my powers. There’s a chance that he could try to drain me while I’m doing this,’ she said in a low whisper, eyes darting to the prisoner.
Cupping her hands with the string inside, she breathed hot into them, rubbed them together, started to tie the ends into a loop. That done, she looped it over her forefingers, gave it a tug.
‘I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to use this. This string is like my magical circuit breaker.’ She set the string about both hands, stretching it into a rectangle shape. The top most corners were set in the crevice between each thumb and forefinger, the two vertical sides biting across her knuckles. ‘It makes the magic less potent. It’s for real beginners really and with the stuff we’re doing, I didn’t want to use it but after the knife…’
‘Get on with it. What does it do?’
‘If something goes wrong you have to break it from my grip. If I lose control or Reeves tries to get something.’
‘Won’t do itself?’ asked Caleb. ‘S’what a circuit breaker does.’
‘No. If something goes wrong then you have to break it from my grip. That’ll kill the spell and pull me out.’
‘More like a kill switch.’
‘Fine. A kill switch then.’
‘Why didn’t we use this before?’ asked Amanda. ‘That blessing almost killed you.’
‘It’s like training wheels. It makes everything slower and harder. I’d hoped I could…’
‘Run before you could crawl.’
‘It’s not like we have much of a choice is it? Look, if something goes wrong then grab this from my hand. OK?’
‘We’ve got it,’ said Amanda. ‘What do we look out for?’
‘You’ll know it when you see it.’ Steph took a deep breath and exhaled long and slow. She closed her eyes, tested the tension.
Amanda had a feeling that this was less a part of the ritual and more to do with anxiety. She resisted the urge to ask Steph if she was ready for this, knew it would only undermine the girl’s confidence. Girl was showing real backbone doing this so soon after what had already happened.
‘Right,’ said Steph, ‘this is going to be weird. For you, I mean.’
Now it was Amanda’s turn to feel nervous. She hadn’t had magic done to her in years and never by consent. She gripped her knees hard and nodded. Every step was a step closer to her daughter.
It had been days since she’d last talked to AK. The man had no idea what was happening, no idea if he’d hear from them again. She tried to push away thoughts of what a man like that might do to young woman under his power.
With a frown of concentration Steph stared at her, through her and began to wind the loop of string in her hands.
It was a simple cat’s cradle, the string crossing and re-crossing into the structure that even Amanda had learned at school. As soon as it was complete, Steph let the shape collapse into a string ‘O’. She did exactly the same thing again.
She wasn’t looking at what she was doing, just staring straight ahead, the youthful creases in her forehead deepening as she made and destroyed the cradle over and over. Making and releasing, making and releasing, taking her time.
Just as Amanda was becoming familiar with the movements that the girl’s hands were tracing in the air, the pattern changed. Though she only saw the new cradle for a second at a time before the girl collapsed it again she could see that this one was more complex. This one she did again and again her hands swimming around one another, unhurried, confident.
A new pattern.
And then another.
Amanda could see each one less clearly. Less time on each before moving onto the next.
The tang of magic began to ooze from the air. Amanda fought herself not to gag or snatch the thing from the girl’s hand. She could hear her heart in her ears, her laboured breath, the constant whisper of string on flesh, the tiny sounds of biological movement, the girl’s fingers in their joints, her wrists rotating.
Amanda worked her own hands open and closed, feeling her knuckles shift. Memories were fighting for space, clawing to be remembered. She was cowering in the corner, her mother swaying, tranced in the middle of the room. The smell of unwashed bodies and blood, food rotting on unwashed plates in the sink. The dull hot pain of a broken arm, hardwired with shame.
No single pattern was being repeated now, a new one every turn, immensely complex; crossing and twisting in ways that she wasn’t sure were possible.
‘Holy shit,’ she breathed.
Steph gasped, drawing Amanda’s attention up to her face. The girl’s pupils contracted, growing smaller and smaller until they were bare pinpricks and, as she exhaled again, they were gone too. The pupils were missing entirely, leaving just the whites and the stony, blue-green of her irises.
Amanda felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. The reek of magic increased a hundredfold, tasted in her sinuses, in her throat.
The lack of pupils made the girl seem blind.
They’ve gone somewhere else, Amanda found herself thinking. She’s looking in a direction I didn’t even know existed.
Steph’s hands were still working at the string. The time between each new pattern was so short now that all Amanda could see was the string writhing and reshaping of its own accord.
‘So, what do I do?’ Amanda asked.
Steph pushed.
Everything changed. And stayed exactly the same.
For a split second, Amanda thought Steph had thrown the writhing twine at her but there it was in the girl’s hands. But now it was a rich, honeyed gold, glowing as though catching the first morning rays through Amanda’s bedroom window. It opened and closed between the girl’s hands like the breath of a living thing. Its movement, the sound of string against string, rang with a sound like metal being sharpened.
Amanda blinked, adjusting her vision. Everything had been reduced to black and white, drab and monotone. Except…
It wasn’t just the string that had changed. Steph was glowing a faint blue that rose and fell like a pulse.
Amanda had to admit, it was beautiful. Like seeing a new colour for the first time. There were sparks of it in the air, drifting like snow, light streaming down like the carriage was open to the heavens. Amanda took a breath, wanted to raise her arms to embrace the sky.
She could taste the girl’s emotions – a strong snap of anxiety, there was pride there. Fear. Grief. Steph had explained this would help her see as Reeves saw. Bridget had been right, Reeves didn’t so much read thoughts as he read people. Just like her. She just hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful.
‘This is amazing.’
A wave of dizziness hit her and the world changed again, cutting her elation short as she took the room in a second time. The glow remained but now the room was soiled, the walls, boxes, everything smirched and overgrown with some dark substance.
Steph was mottled from head to toe, dark stains covering her skin and clothes like a cloying moss. It was black, like crude oil only so much worse, the deepest, darkest black Amanda had ever seen, patching the girl’s face, her hands, her torso.
‘Where its attention’s been,’ explained Steph.
Amanda looked down at her own hands and found more there. More on her chest and down her legs. She tried wiping it off but it didn’t shift under the pressure of her fingertips.
‘You OK?’ asked Caleb.
The big man was covered in the black infection, from the top of his head to his feet, great spatters of it like he’d stepped out of an abattoir. He tasted of worry.
‘It’s working.’ Amanda’s voice sounded funny in her own ears, muffled somehow.
Steph’s expression was a rictus, her eyes still blank, glaring over the twine at something still invisible to her. The girl was getting tired, wondering if she was doing the right thing, Amanda could taste that too.
Amanda got to her feet, resisting the urge to shake her head, squeeze her eyes shut, blink to clear her vision.
Skeebs was black. Almost every inch of him was covered with corruption, the occasional penny-sized bit of skin or clothing showing through. But he was glowing. Like Steph, he seemed to emit a blue energy but where Steph’s was a soft light, Skeebs’ was a furnace, trapped beneath the skin, silhouetting veins and bones, sparks running like insects across him.
She crouched at the boy’s side, unable to rip her gaze away from the swarm of sparks. Its nexus seemed to be concentrated in Skeebs’ stomach. So close and the melancholy that had touched her earlier swept through her. It was more nuanced now, anxiety and fear. Skeebs’ emotions bleeding out from his skin. ‘What do I do?’ she asked over her shoulder.
‘Sever the connection,’ Steph replied.
‘What connection?’ The question didn’t even reach Amanda’s lips. Another dizzy spell and she could see it, long, thin strings that clung like spider webs up and down Skeebs’ body, all of them clumping together and leading back to…
If she’d thought the corruption was black, its source was worse. Reeves stood taller than a man, so black he was a rip in space. So dark that he wasn’t a presence but an absence, a window onto something else. She could feel it tug like a vacuum, it smelled like a penny tasted. Amanda felt that if she put out a hand she would meet no resistance, only reach through into the abyss beyond. It wasn’t the shape of her son but the thing inside him. It was wings and mandibles and horns and spines, undefinable shapes that swayed, twitched and shivered in the void breeze. Amanda was glad that she was spared the detail of that beast, the shape itself sending an animal fear burrowing through her bones.
Dark tendrils of the stuff reached out of the void, clinging to Skeebs like a spider wrapping its prey. But it was more than that. Even from a distance, Amanda could feel them pulsing and churning, like it was draining Skeebs of one thing and pumping him full with another, a circulatory system sucking and slurping and squeezing and pushing. The sparks had their nexus around where Skeebs’ tendril burrowed into his belly.
This was it, the connections, the draining the demon had talked about.
‘I thought we had to open ourselves,’ said Amanda.
‘Only for magical energy,’ said Steph, the strain showing in her voice. ‘It’s draining something else. But it’s putting magical energy into him. It’s weird.’ She grimaced. ‘This is getting difficult.’
And Amanda saw there were tendrils in Steph too, not as many but there they were, clinging to her face and heart and belly, drawing from her. They were on Caleb, stringing his face to his hands, wrapping him up, holding him down.
With a growing sense of horror, Amanda looked down at the dark webs burrowed into her own flesh. There were little shimmers of something traveling under the skin of those thin capillaries out of her and into the void. They were all over her chest, clouding her vision where it covered her face.
‘Come on,’ Steph moaned.
‘What do I do?’
Steph’s teeth were gritted. ‘Anything.’
‘What’s happening?’ asked Caleb.
Amanda swept her hands, tried brushing them clean but her hands passed through without the barest hint of sensation.
‘I can’t touch it.’ She waved a hand to sever the strands that connected Reeves to Caleb to the same effect. ‘Maybe if we used the knife.’
‘Not powerful enough,’ said Steph.
‘Right. Then let’s—’
There was a change in the air, some atavistic sense telling her there was someone else in the room. She turned to the demon in time to see something step out from the void into the car.
This was man-shaped but there the similarity ended. It was shadow made substance, dark, sinister intent.
Amanda stood frozen, fear clogging her throat. No eyes and she knew the Reeves-thing was looking back at her, regarding her before it turned its alien attention to Steph.
Amanda put herself in its path.
It took a step, another. It made no sound, no sound, not even the contact of flesh on the floor.
Amanda planted her feet, readying herself, sweat running from her brow. She raised fists. Go for its face, see how things went from there.
This she could do. This she could fight.
It stopped, just out of reach.
Adrenalin singing in her veins, Amanda stepped forward and took the swing.
And hit nothing. The Reeves-thing blinking out without Amanda seeing it disappear. Like it never was.
She stumbled and after a moment’s processing, felt a brief wave of relief. ‘OK, let’s—’
The Reeves-thing was standing behind Steph, towering above her, that man-shaped void looking down at her as she worked, as though considering something. It reached out a black, silent hand.
‘No, wait!’ Amanda leapt across the room, unclear on what she would do if she reached the girl in time.
Steph jerked, a spasm racking her from the middle out. Reeves’ hand hovered over her head. Her blue aura began to fragment, splinters of black cracking open and growing everywhere, sliding under and over the girl’s own shimmering energy.
Her hands didn’t stop for a moment, the string describing complex waveforms. The smell coming off her was nothing but fear, fear, fear.
Amanda went to snatch the squirming string from her fingers. And hesitated. It was the constant motion, that scissor snip sound it made. Suddenly she was afraid that her hand would pass right through it – a burst of blood, flesh and bone – torn to shreds by the flickering nylon.
Steph’s panic turned to pain. She let out a long keening sound, the black fragments fracturing and multiplying in a kaleidoscope.
Amanda lunged forward, grasping the writhing ball in both hands, stopping its motion. The girl’s hands jammed still. Steph’s breath burst from her body in ragged, savage gasps.
The aura was gone, the tendrils absent. Reeves back in his chains.
Except none of that was true. Even though she couldn’t see it, Amanda was convinced that she could still feel it, those suckers or whatever that had been leeching on her insides.
Steph slumped, breathing hard. When she looked back up her pupils had returned. She flexed her fingers, the skin rubbed raw from the roughness of the string.
‘Are you alright?’ Amanda asked.
She waved him away.
‘What happened?’ asked Caleb.
The girl bowed forward, head in her hands. ‘I saw into its head,’ she said. ‘I saw how it escaped.’
‘Tell us,’ said Coleman.