Lisbeth McQuarrie
I had such an uneasy sense about me. Wouldn’t you? Why, it seemed as if the entire kingdom was on the edge of one epic and complete defeat. There was nothing that could possibly come to our aid. All of our friends were far gone, and even if Wintersmith managed the impossible and protected the grimoire, I didn’t think it would matter anymore. Bram was simply too powerful. And, apparently, too well-connected.
If the least I could do was concentrate to find out who these two ultimately worked for, it was what I would manage. But it was hard work. For the curse kept leaping with fearsome strength in my mind. I could hear it and sense its greed. But every time I attuned to it too carefully, it tried to make me into itself.
Wasn’t that how viruses worked? In fact, you could find many examples from the natural and unnatural kingdoms about things trying to force other things to become themselves. It stood for what Bram had done to Grace. And presumably, whoever had done that to Bram beforehand.
But who could it be? Who would have the power? And who would have the connections?
“Startling. Can you hear it?” Grace said, the first time she’d acted tamely ever since revealing her powers. We now stood at the back of the palace in front of a large resplendent window. She stared out of one of the panes, hand on the iron frame.
And beyond, I could hear it, all right. The never-ending screams of ghosts and the ordinary mortal population too. For that wolf had a corporeal form nobody could ignore as it raced through the streets doing the darkest of deeds.
I wanted to grasp her shoulders, spin her around, and stop her. What exactly did she think this was? Good fun?
It was something far, far more dangerous. It would destroy everything she had ever known. And if she had even an ounce of love left for her kingdom, she ought to rise to its defense. Not kick it down further. But I’d forgotten who I was speaking about.
Grace turned. Her sharp gaze cut me out of the air. Then it locked on my feet and finally rose to my face. “I wonder if she’s still in there? Probably not. A terribly weak witch, that Lisbeth.”
Bram snorted. “She’s still in there. I fancy she’s far stronger than you think. Your mother gave her her powers, after all.”
Grace stabbed a finger my way, the knuckle so rigid, it could’ve snapped. “She stole my mother’s power.” The word stole was spat out of her lips so fast, she could’ve ejected it from the palace. It would’ve done nothing for the terrified population beyond but given them something else to run from.
I no longer had control of my eyes. I certainly no longer had control of my lips. I’d lost both some time ago. But Bram was right, and I was very much still inside my own mind. And I was very much still planning their downfall. Was such an act arrogant? Was it hubris to think I had a chance? These two were virtually godlike now. But it was neither.
I would create my opportunity. For these two were at each other’s throats as much as they were assisting one another. And as for the person who had created them… I would find a way to unwind their powers.
That thought jumped into my head, quick and snapping like a spring.
If a dead practitioner could be created, could they also be uncreated? Could I find the dead power within them, snap it, and send it back to the earth where it had always belonged? You might claim it was nothing but pointless ambition. I would try, nonetheless.
So I did the one thing these fools could not stop. I started to pay attention to the Ley lines. There were more of those red strands. They proliferated the air, in fact. They were more numerous than most of the Ley lines themselves. And, far more worryingly, they were growing. On fast forward, right before my eyes. One would branch out from another, and though the sound was mostly imperceptible, occasionally I tuned in with enough attention to hear it. It was like the magnified noise of hair being split.
Perhaps with the added ghastly sound of a very low moan right there at the end. I imagined it was the rest of the curse getting ready to rise through the very earth.
I was forced to stride forward now as Bram pointed to the back of the palace. I did not know what he intended to do. Surely he couldn’t let his wolf ghost rip apart this city without any supervision? I’d seen its eyes, smelt its breath, and seen the way it had looked. It was controlled in so far as a wild beast can be. Especially a dark creature. Should your hold on their leash ever lesson by even a fraction, they would escape to do what they were born to – sow mayhem and destruction.
Bram was not the kind to be questioned, though. “I’m sure our master has done what he wanted to now. More dead practitioners will join our ranks soon. As such, the wolf will only grow in power.”
“Yet no dead practitioner will be as perfect as me, will they, Bram?” Grace took the opportunity to hiss that. She even raced half a step up to his side.
He paused and swiveled his deadly gaze toward her, his dark eyebrows descending with a twitch. “Raw power means nothing when you do not have the requisite intelligence to back it up with.”
Never a truer statement was said. And it was an accusation that could fairly be leveled back at him. For Bram only had certain knowledge. The knowledge of a mercenary who existed to steal what they could not make.
Though it was hard, I had been watching how he interacted with the Ley lines and the dead energies, and he hadn’t once yet created anything. The wolf had already existed. As for the Ley lines… I wasn’t even sure he knew about the red Ley lines. I tracked his gaze now as he walked through a particularly large patch of them. And they grew right around his chest. As I was forced to walk right through them, regardless of the curse beating within me, I internally shivered at the complex and nasty energies involved.
Bram did not react.
… In my head, Bram had created these red communication strands. He had created the half-ghosts too, but come to think of it, judging by the conversation he’d had with Grace, perhaps she had created the half-ghosts. Could she see the red strands, though? That was hard to say. She was so very directed. She was focused on Bram, on snarling at him and beating him. But she too walked through another patch of growing Ley lines and did not seem to notice them at all.
I should not be able to feel excited in my current condition. For what could I possibly be excited about? Everything appeared to be crumbling down around my ears. All the certainty I had once clutched hold of was now nothing more than a curse beating within my chest. But this was still hope. However small and fragile for now.
We walked to one of the many exits at the back of the palace, though this I judged would be grander than the rest. The door had a gilt frame, though it had been rubbed off somewhat over the years. One of those patches drew my eyes to the left and up, and I saw claw marks. Thick and heavy, they must’ve come from that creature. He might’ve grabbed the door before leaping out. Or perhaps he’d done it for balance whilst ripping a ghost’s soul from them. For as I was forced to walk through, I suddenly shuddered. Not just internally – it took to my shoulders and shook me like somebody was trying to tear down a house.
“She’s breaking through,” Grace suddenly hissed as she leapt toward me, hand outstretched.
Bram rolled his eyes, grabbed her fingers, and threw them down by her side. “It was just an automatic body reaction. Look at her eyes. She has no control. The infection is still in place on her neck. Grace, I’ve told you once, and I will tell you again, passion and raw power do not make up for intelligence.”
“By the end of this, Bram Stone,” she said in the most direct and violent voice I’d ever heard, “you will get yours.”
“But not before you get yours,” he growled. “Now—”
Before he could finish whatever he wanted to say, there was an awfully loud screech from across the city. The sun was setting.
I… I had lost track of time. I had not known whether it was morning or night. But as I saw the sunset, and a few of its oranges and purples blinked through the thick storm clouds, my heart set with it. For another fiendish cry cracked over the city. I heard people screaming amongst it, their cries even more desperate than before.
Bram simply shoved his hands into his pockets, tipped his head back, and laughed. “Not long now.”
“We must monitor the wolf—”
“We are. Can’t you hear it? Can’t you see all of those delicious dead energies?” He thrust his hand to the side, and, intrigued, I waited to conclude whether he could see the Ley lines. He couldn’t. I believed he was gesturing toward a very thick ghastly cloud of ghost force. One could only imagine that was what occurred when a ghost’s soul was ripped from them.
It was horrendous… but it confirmed my theory now, didn’t it? He could see that, for it was massive. But he could not see the finer details of dead energy.
Did that mean I had a chance? We would see.
Grace went to move. Once more, he grabbed her wrist and turned her around. “Come. We have been instructed to find the old king’s ghost. A strong leader, he’ll give our master precisely what he needs.”
I shuddered. They were going after King Li? No, they couldn’t.
“Why do you believe he will be on the palace grounds?” Grace snarled.
“I don’t imagine he will be. He’ll be down in the basements. But there’s easy access from here. Do not dally.” Bram strode forward.
I followed him. But I knew, at any moment, Grace could grasp hold of me instead. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her fingers twitching and recognized the need flaring in her pupils.
The rain still pounded down. It felt like an appropriate accompaniment to the apocalypse raging across this town. For the screams of the wolf continued. And I had never heard such chaos in its wake.
I had a somewhat fraught relationship with the ordinary mortals of this town. I primarily tried to stay away from them. But no one and nothing deserved this horror. Yet no one and nothing could stop it.
Bram took us over to one of the old wells. Carved from stone, it was rimmed by rose gardens. Perhaps they had once been beautiful, but under the battering forces of the rain, every single rose petal had been torn off, and they were now strewn through the mud. A few were even caught by the wind and fluttered up around me. They were blood red. How very appropriate. For tonight only blood would run in the streets of this once great land.
“Keep up,” Bram snarled. That was an invitation to Grace, not me.
For Grace had a choice in this matter, and I very much did not. He grabbed me by the arm and tugged me roughly into the well. He leapt right over the stone ledge, and I followed his move.
The well was deep, so very deep I did not for a second see the bottom. Then it flashed from underneath me, dark and deadly.
I imagined Bram was just the kind of vicious monster not to catch me. But the curse caught me instead. Just as Bram landed down in his own magic, I felt the curse reach out and call to the rest of it in the very ground beneath me. Tendrils of dead energy rose up, snapped around my feet and wrists, and held me in place. It was hardly the kindest way to catch someone. But at least it was effective.
Grace finally landed down beside us. “How did it catch her, do you think?” she muttered to Bram in a rare truce rather than screaming at him.
“It would’ve been the curse, of course. Now come.”
… They couldn’t see the curse manifesting through me, either? Just how blind were they? Just how significant were the limitations of their dead magic?
I’d already claimed to you that I had never seen any magic as ordered as Grace’s. But order does not necessarily account for raw power.
I watched them with a more careful eye, but it could not last. We hunted the old king, and Bram was unfortunately efficient.
He dragged some device out of his pocket. I had never seen its like. It had a glass screen, and behind that, a trapped spell. Suspended in it was a small metal pin. It almost resembled a compass, but it was a wild one indeed. With one step, the metal pin would spin abruptly to the left, then with another, it would jerk uncontrollably to the right. But soon enough as he continued walking, its signal became stronger. It pointed reliably southwest.
“He’s here. The old fool. I imagine he knows what’s going on, but he won’t leave his post. In his head, kings must go down with their sinking ship.”
“That’s captains, fool,” Grace snarled at him.
“It’s the same thing. Now,” Bram said darkly. “There.”
The magical compass now reliably showed the southwest direction, and Bram picked up the pace and sprinted.
He dragged me forward with every step, though I was starting to appreciate he had no clue what was actually dragging me. He obviously had control over the spell, but it was not nuanced, nor was it something he understood.
The question rose, then – could I disrupt it?
Did I have the power? Could I scrounge the strength?
If you had asked me before this mess had begun, before I’d met and become indentured to one Winchester Stone, I would have told you no. Because back then I had firmly understood that the one way to limit one’s exposure to danger was to not court it. When you found it, you had to run away. There was no point in testing your magic against an opponent’s if the fight couldn’t benefit you.
How could one run away now? Especially as Bram reached out and settled a hand on my shoulder. “You will move quickly when you see him. Rip his heart out. Do not dally.”
Fear rose through me, hard and fast.
I had only met King Li for a short period of time, but wasn’t that quite irrelevant? He’d helped me to save Winchester, and fundamentally, he no longer wanted to see his kingdom like this. Maybe he’d made mistakes. Perhaps he should’ve haunted the current king. But one cannot live in the past when they must try with all of their might to save the future.
We walked around another tight turn in the corridor. For every turn in these basements was compact. The air felt more stagnant than it had before. I could tell why. It wasn’t for lack of airflow. This section was connected to the well. But the curse kept rising higher, destroying all of the natural air and sowing its horrid destruction. Leave it to rise as much as it wanted for as long as it wanted, and it would poison every single underground space in the kingdom, then swiftly move on to all of those above.
“I’ve seen him. Just there. Run,” Grace commanded me.
And just like that, with a single statement, she took over the curse. I must admit her control was much finer than Bram’s. He did not even have time to try to rectify his spell. It simply slipped out of his hands and was grasped up by Grace instead.
And I ran. I spun around the corner to see King Li’s mournful face at the end of the tunnel. His head was far more visible than the rest of him. I imagined he chose to show his expression in this moment, the darkest his kingdom had ever seen. There was no point in showing his hands, for there was nothing to pick up, nothing to fight, and nothing he could save.
My wet skirts flared around me, dead magic rising from the curse and soon drying them. But it did not do a good job. It made them more fragile as if it had dried them with some kind of flame torch. It felt as if, with one tap, they would break and fall into dust all around me.
King Li continued to stare at me mournfully. All I did within my own mind was scream at him to run. Couldn’t he see me barreling down upon him? Didn’t he understand how fraught this moment was? Yes, he ought to go down with his ship, considering this was his kingdom, but if he failed to save himself when he knew his power could be broken down for the curse, he would only be condemning us.
He waited until the last moment then drifted into the wall. He made eye contact with me. I saw his bottom lip slip down from the top one, and though it seemed to be hard, he muttered one word, “Free.”
What did it mean? That he was about to run free? Good. But unfortunately, it did not mean that at all.
“The wall, Grace,” Bram snapped.
She shoved her hand out, opened her palm wide, and attacked the wall. It soon exploded in a great show of magic.
And there, just behind it, was King Li. He hadn’t fled far yet.
“Rip his soul out,” Grace roared. She had the bloodthirsty voice of somebody used to death sports.
How exactly could she be her mother’s daughter? What had happened to Grace? She certainly wasn’t adopted. They had the same eyes and nose.
What had driven Grace to this point? And was I right? Had she once been in love with Winchester? And not this, whatever it was? I would not call it love. It was a dangerous and violent lust.
Every single person wants to believe that circumstances will never break them, that they have some moral advantage over everyone else. It’s not true. Take that from a dead practitioner like myself. I had seen such a range of people over the years that I could conclude the wrong circumstances could break even the most correct and upstanding of souls.
But I didn’t get the impression something horrible had happened to Grace. She’d done this because she couldn’t get what she’d wanted.
And now she would push others to do the vilest things possible all in the hope she could finally scrounge her way toward her final goal.
King Li didn’t try to run this time.
No. How horrible. He must escape. But he did not. And I reached him.
Such a surge of hatred flowed through my body on the wings of the curse, I thought I had snapped and lost my ethics in one foul go.
My hands reached his shoulders and pinned them. I felt the curse’s forceful anger rise up and shoot through my limbs. It coursed into my fingers as I bent them harder into his shoulders.
And King Li simply mournfully stared at me. Right in front of my eyes, my attack started to break him down.
Oh no, how ghastly. He couldn’t let me do this. I was holding on within my own body, as far from the curses I could get because I foolishly had a scrap of hope. This would burn it up and crush it under my feet.
I longed to scream at him to get out of here, but instead I watched as he rediverted most of his ghost power to his lips. They twitched and opened wide. He whispered, “Free. You can get free. You must simply believe.”
Bram and Grace had not reached us yet. They wisely chose to remain back, for what was the point in investing themselves in this fight? They had me, their perfect weapon. All they required was to stand back quite comfortably and control me.
It wasn’t as if I could break free.
But King Li seemed to think so.
There must be a reason he did not fight, even though I knew he had the strength to try. He simply looked into my eyes all the harder. “Last chance. Yours, mine, and everyone’s. If you can’t break free, Lisbeth, it’s over.”
Last… last chance.
One should not be able to feel time. Yes, you can feel its effects, for it comes hand-in-hand with change. But it is not a logical and proportional relationship. That is to say, one does not change the same amount with every single second, and you cannot use change to try to count time.
And I was telling you this why?
Because I suddenly felt time as something different indeed. A… chance. Every second was not one that dragged me closer to defeat. Every second was the universe reborn anew. Every second came with an impossible-to-count wealth of opportunities. I just had to reach out and grasp them. I had to refocus my attention off what I could not do and onto the only action I could currently take.
The curse’s foul energy continued to break down King Li’s form. It happened right in front of my face, and there was simply nowhere to go to get away from the violent sight. I heard this terrible cracking. It started in his neck. It revealed black lines of energy within. No. It wasn’t energy at all. It was some empty space, a vacuum perhaps.
I had never questioned what was inside a ghost. This was it. They didn’t have a body beating with blood and throbbing with flesh. They had an idea, if you will. And, critically, a soul wrapped up around it. A soul that could not let go until its final needs were met.
I think Grace snarled at me from behind to hurry up. I could feel just how much she wanted the king to break. Bram was no better. But I tuned out their voices as best as I could. I fixed the only strength I had forward onto the singular possibility of escaping. How could I do that? How could I do that when—
I stopped myself from finishing that thought. There were a thousand things I could fill it in with.
But fill it in, and all I would do was make it a fait accompli. Right now, I had the power to write my own story, my own ending too, or a new beginning.
The curse ought to be impossible to fight. It was the strongest magic I had ever encountered. And with my own force rooted in the earth – with all dead practitioner magic ultimately rooted in the earth – surely it meant I should be more controllable and not less so? This curse had resided in the ground for God knows how long. And in the ground it had learned the secrets of everything around it. It had whispered to the earth, it’d danced with the insects, and it had claimed the dead.
“One last chance,” King Li said. But he obviously did not believe I could take it, for I watched as, dramatically, one last time, he closed his eyes. His expression softened, and I could appreciate he was getting ready to relieve himself of this life. He had tried all he could. He had scrounged at every opportunity. But there must come a time when we give up.
That time… that time could come tomorrow. Not today.
I stopped telling myself I couldn’t possibly control the curse.
I stared at the Ley lines converging around me instead. Everything appeared to come back to them. I had never appreciated how important they were for dead practitioner magic until I had stolen and briefly read Winchester’s book. He had conducted some epic scientific study mapping the Ley lines around the entire city. He knew where they were strongest, where they were weakest, and where they were growing. He’d even mapped them in the palace.
The palace had some of the deepest veins of all. Quite sensible considering it had large crypts beneath it.
But Ley lines could not be created by anyone living, could they? And what of the red Ley lines?
Someone had crafted those. A dead practitioner – just like me. So why couldn’t I create my own?
I stared at the Ley lines. This all happened in a split second as the curse finally rose all the way through me, its eagerness to destroy the king the loudest, vilest thing in existence.
But before it could push all the way into my fingertips, course through his ethereal body, and break it down, I held on.
For I, Lisbeth McQuarrie, started to believe I’d always been fated to win from the beginning.
There must’ve been a reason Wintersmith had chosen me. And there must’ve been a reason I encountered Winchester.
Perhaps that reason had not been destined from birth. But when you are powerful, you make your own fate and fortune.
I screamed. In my head, in my soul, right in the center of my magic – I screamed and called out to the Ley lines. There was no way to move them and no way to control them. Yet.
“Why is it taking so long? It should be over by now,” Grace began, but she had no idea about the war I was waging within and no idea of the battle I was about to win.
Just when it seemed all was lost and I had no chance at all, I carved one right out of the heart of defeat. Internally, I screamed louder than I ever had, calling upon the very basis of my magic. I dragged it toward me with a shaking heart but a stronger soul.
And around me, in a snapping motion I would never forget like the very heavens falling from the skies, the Ley lines converged. They twisted in like a vortex. I now understood previously it had looked as if they were worms meandering through the dirt, looking for some goal. That goal was me. Now they flocked around me, their power concentrating within.
And just as they did, I regained control of my left hand.
Bram was the first to notice, the only one with a keen eye, even though it was usually turned to the things he could take and not necessarily an objective view of reality.
“What the devil?” he spat.
It wasn’t the work of the devil. Trust me. This was the work of the soul.
I screamed again internally as I finally forced my attention into my other hand. I pushed the curse back. I regained control of the most important parts of my body and instantly ended the spell digesting the king.
His eyes had been closed, and resignation had set in, but now the slightest smile twitched across his lips. “Finish it. Break free of the curse’s control. You won’t be able to strip it from you yet. But you will be able to take your body and fight.”
So take my body and fight I did.
I flung the king back. I got him out of the way as I spun and thrust forward. Grace did not expect it, but Bram did.
Bram, however, would not win. He had not won against me in the cemetery when he had tried to steal Sarah-Anne’s soul, and he could not win now.
I forced a hand forward. The king was right. The curse still beat within me, still rose through my veins, still begged to be satiated. But its greed and force could be used, and use it I did. I channeled it into my punch as I locked one foot down, pivoted, and attacked Bram.
It was just as he leapt into the air. I saw the fear and anger burning in his gaze. It was clear, in his books at least, nobody went against him. But there was nobody like me now, was there?
I punched him out of the air. My solid blow sliced into his chin, and his head jerked back with a click.
I was surprised when the coldhearted Grace actually locked her fingers around her lips and screamed Bram’s name.
It couldn’t last.
I’d thrust the king back, and the wise man had drifted through the wall, albeit slowly, as he was quite likely injured.
But Grace wouldn’t let him go. And she certainly wouldn’t let me go. She roared, crossed her arms in front of her chest, and practiced some quick spell. She muttered under her breath, but I could not hear her words. I could only put up with the brunt of her attack as it surged toward me.
I thought I would’ve looked impressive, and surely I must have. With all the Ley lines converging around me, I would’ve seemed blessed by the very heavens. But Grace was cursed by the very underworld. A fact she proved as she thrust her hand forward and interacted with the dirt beneath my feet.
It was as if I was on a tablecloth and someone had suddenly yanked it out from underneath me. I jolted down, a dangerous fact as rocks started to rise. Jagged and half broken, they were the equivalent of Earth’s daggers. They shot toward my throat.
Who knew what Grace’s plan was? Likely she hadn’t thought things through. Her reactive anger simply wanted to win and prove she was the stronger practitioner. But I had a secret now, didn’t I? Her mother’s own force.
I had not appreciated until now exactly what Arlene had given me. I’d assumed it was simply the ability to interact with the forbidden grimoire. Now I felt her far keener sense for the earth expand through my fingers and shiver on my lips. It was as if I was one with it, a cave far, far beneath the Earth’s crust. A pocket of life amongst that which recycled it.
Just before the rocks could slice across my throat, I forced out a hand and controlled the very ground right out from underneath Grace. If standing on it had been like having a tablecloth pulled out from underneath me, for Grace, it was like having the very earth pulled out from underneath her. For I dug down even deeper. I even reached a level below.
Grace’s pretty blinking eyes stared up at me. Then she fell down through the darkness for several meters until I heard a thunk.
I could have left it at that and run. I needed to hammer home my victory and critically break these two apart. For the longer Grace and Bram spent apart, the more their already treacherous hearts would turn against one another.
I might not have the power to take them both on at the same time, but they certainly had the power to tear one another down.
Slamming my hands down on the crackling dirt, I lifted it up like one might a newborn child. It healed the gap in the floor, locking Grace down below. She shrieked, but it was soon cut short.
If I had thought that meant I was out of the woods, good luck, for Bram rose behind me like the vestige of the darkest ghost.
He plunged a hand into his pocket. Why, of course. That was his go-to move. He did not fight you with his strength. He fought you with all of the things he’d stolen.
I would not give him the chance.
“Move through the floor and run. You have the curse with you. There is nothing to hold your body off from moving through matter now,” I heard King Li’s call. His head popped out through the wall many meters behind me.
I was not stupid enough to waste the time to turn and stare. But his words penetrated, nonetheless.
Bram yanked a potion out of his pocket then threw it on the ground. The first and only thing I noted that mattered was it was a very peculiar crimson red. This was not blood. It was… the crushed remains of a soul crystal. I had never known that you could carve them up into dust. I would never have tried. It would’ve felt like sacrilege. But if there was one man good at bending and rewriting every rule of decency, it was Bram Stone.
He threw the dust onto himself, mostly onto his fist, and the conclusion soon became clear that he would thrust it into my face to knock me out for good. He jolted forward, showing his strength and training as a military man. He was so quick, I almost couldn’t track him. But I was agile myself, and a lifetime of dealing with ghost requests had given me the skills to fight.
I spun to the side. I experimentally tried to force my foot through the floor. A very distracting thing indeed when I had to keep my wits about me.
He hissed, got close, and his punch sliced just by my ear. I almost felt it connect. His knuckles were so close, if I’d moved even a micron to the left, they would have struck me. The blow they’d rendered might’ve only been glancing, but trust me, with the crimson soul crystal dust, it would’ve felled me, anyway.
That dust was… so very unnatural. I could hear it calling out to me. It wanted to return to what it had been, and if it could not, it wished to descend into the earth to be recycled.
And it was not the only one crying out for that. I did not know what was happening to my senses, but I could feel them far more keenly than I ever had before. Blame it on the curse opening energy channels in my body or something else entirely, but it felt as if my dead practitioner powers were growing by the second.
Wait, it was no feeling. That vortex of Ley lines still remained above me. Startlingly, so very shockingly, they started to grow. Just as I had seen those red Ley lines branching off from one another and proliferating previously, I now witnessed the same thing above me. But my Ley lines were white – this crystalline, clear hue as if they did not need color. They were there to transport and transform what was already around them.
Those crimson Ley lines, on the other hand, were there to steal power but never make it.
“Come here,” Bram roared.
His voice was so very primed for dangerous threats. I wondered if he had ever smiled naturally in all of his life? I knew the answer. No.
How could a man like Bram be created? How could somebody lose all human decency and trade it for power?
Perhaps the kingdom had done it for him. Perhaps he’d only ever had the poorest of examples growing up.
And perhaps I did not need to know that to defeat him.
He went to punch me one last time. I needed to escape now. Lord knows what was happening to the rest of the palace, but unless I got out there, everything would worsen. I believed, even from here, I could hear the wolf.
We were deep underground, but that was quite irrelevant. Its heinous cry still echoed out loud. And it would still be destroying every single ghost it came across. Enough.
I’d never had love lost for ghosts because I’d never truly understood my role. But now my role was in my hands, and I would not let go of it for the world.
Just as Bram punched me, I reached out, and I held onto that punch. I did it, not with my body and not with my mind, but with the very center of my magic. But here’s the thing. I failed to hold the punch. Because it sailed right through my hand. I, in the most startling moment of my life, got to decide what could hold me and what could not.
You should have seen Bram’s eyes. Never had a man looked more surprised nor more frightened as to what could happen next.
“Impossible,” he began.
I would not fight with words when actions were far more suitable.
Again, I got to decide what I could interact with and what could not interact with me. I leapt up, jumping with quite some agility – then I forced my foot out. I kicked him. It was such a solid move, he did not have a chance. Nor could he call on the power of his crimson crystal dust to fight me.
He was thrust back. He fell face-first against the upturned dirt, just above where Grace had disappeared. I could thrust him down through the floor and trap them together, but I’d already told you I needed to keep them separate. For dark hearts will only grow darker toward one another when they are not present.
He roared. He stretched a hand out to me. But it was far too late.
I elbowed him and pushed him into the wall to the left. It took but a moment to grasp hold of his hand and force him through the dirt. I practiced my ghost magic but also my earth magic. And there was nothing he could do to fight off against such a tremendously strong show.
He hissed darkly. His eyes opened wide with regret. But he could do nothing more. I thrust him through the wall, and it closed off behind him. While I certainly knew he had the power to break the stone, I did not give him that option. As I placed a trembling hand on it, I resorted the molecules. And yes, you heard that correctly. I strengthened their bonds, drawing magic and force from wherever I could to ensure that nothing short of the strongest practitioner in the land could break them.
And then, why, when it was over, I took my first breath. Edgy, somewhat confused, but rather powerful nonetheless, I could’ve pretended it meant I had won. But it was not over. It had barely begun.
King Li appeared through the wall to my side. He was still so very insubstantial. I had damaged him. I doubted he would ever heal. It wasn’t as if ghosts, once they were dead, could ever find more energy.
“King Li,” I began, a tear welling in my eye.
He lifted one hand. It was so very insubstantial, it was more accurate to say he lifted one wisp.
He looked at me strictly, gaze cutting back and forth across my face until he hissed, “With you, we have a chance. The only chance we will ever have. Go. Save Winchester. Stop their wolf. Move now.”
I went to move, but I froze. “Save Winchester from what?”
“The king.”
I could’ve questioned. I did not need to. My lips froze with terror as the rest of my brain finally caught up with them. Of course. I’d been questioning who Bram and Grace’s master was. I should never have bothered. It was the master of all. For who could wield enough power over enough people to do as much damage but the king?
“But he’s dead inside. They controlled him with a spell—” I tried to reason through this confusing thought.
“Go. The truth awaits. As does Winchester. You’ll be his final hope. Rise to the challenge, or he will slip beneath for good.”
With that horrifying promise, the king disappeared. I did not think he had died, but he was surely close. And far more frighteningly, Winchester was close, too. I took another step then grasped my indenture mark. I knew that I could not feel him through it. To think I could was nothing more than wishful thinking. But I still grasped it as a single tear streaked down my face, fell off my chin, and splashed against my torn collar. “Winchester, wherever you are, you must hold on. Do you hear me? You must hold on, for if you don’t, I’ll break this indenturing for good, and you will lose me. You’ll… lose me.”
The cold words could go nowhere. But they could at least do one thing. They fixed my focus forward. And I ran. I did not care what would get in my way. I would blast right through it.