A Criminal Magic (13 page)

We all fall silent, and I close my eyes, try to listen with my whole being.

“There's a scratching sound, right over there,” Grace whispers.

“You see anybody?” Ral whips his head around.

Grace nods to the far side of the atrium. “No, but I hear a couple voices, let me amplify.” She pauses. “That wall over there, that's actually not the real atrium wall. It's a force field so they can spy on us. They're right behind it.”

“Who? What are they saying?” I whisper.

“It's . . . Gavin.” Grace closes her eyes. “At least one other . . . they're debating . . .” Grace's eyes fly open. “They're going to drop out the center of the atrium floor.”

The marble floor below us sighs, creaks,
cracks
. . . .

A boom echoes through Grace's atrium. The marble below
our feet breaks open like the spine of a book, a deep gash racing from one point of the circular floor straight across to the other side.

“STAIRS!”
I command as the ground begins to quake. “Come on!”

My conjured set of stairs erupts out of the floor step by step, building itself like a floating set of blocks—one slate of wood stacked, teetering, on top of the other. We climb onto the staircase and follow it as it races to the top of the atrium.

“Christ,” Billy near-whimpers a few steps below me. “Don't look down.”

“Where's this taking us, Joan?” Ral calls ahead to me.

I carefully wave my left hand, sweep it from the left side of the atrium across to the right, and whisper my words of power. Like a giant is stitching a ribbon around the top of a hat, a five-foot runner of carpet begins to run itself around the inside of the atrium. The floating staircase carries us up to the ledge of this new balcony. The four of us clamber onto it, bend over to collect our breath—

And that's when I see Gavin and two of his cronies approaching. They're on a bridge one of them must have conjured, a bridge that arches from what's left of the floor right up to our balcony.

“Ain't no use running,” Gavin calls out to us from the bridge. “My boy James is conferring with Stock's team right now, offering our alliance as you jokers play around.” He smiles as he ascends the bridge. “You admit defeat now, and you'll save us all a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“Bullshit,” Billy spits, as a cold fear settles over me.
So Gavin's team already got to Stock?

“Don't believe it, if you're more comfortable with denial,” Gavin says. “You're dying either way.”

Gavin's threesome laughs as they advance.

Billy mumbles next to me, “If Gavin's right, I'm going to send
everything I've got at him. I'm going down with one hot, brilliant trick.” He pulls his hands back, like he's about to center his magic, throw a ripple through the universe—

“No.” I grab his wrist. “I've got another idea.”

I collapse onto the balcony's floor, quickly run my finger over the carpet in the outline of a square, and whisper, “
Trapdoor emerge
.” My finger trace deepens into the carpet, cuts a perfect square out of the floor, as a silver handle forces its way out of the carpet.

“What are you doing?” Ral says as he crouches behind me.

“Sending us back to that hallway with a linked trick.
In becomes out
.” I flip the trap open, jump feetfirst inside of it—

And end up falling through the trap, magically, instantly passing through the door I'd made in the whitewashed hallway we first stepped into from the clearing. The hallway with no beginning, and no end.

“Shut the door before Gavin gets to it!” Ral orders, as the rest of my team tumbles through the same door.

Billy turns on his heel, slams the door at the same time I command, “
Vanish
.”

We watch as the frame of the door in the hall disappears, like an eraser's been taken to a chalkboard. The doorknob shrinks and then pinches into nothing. And then we're staring at a flat, limitless white wall of plaster.

Billy collapses down next to me. “This is like some devil's fun house.”

I rest my elbows on my knees and breathe into my hands, trying to center myself, calm down. “The door back to the clearing has to be off this hall. It just must be disguised, hidden by Stock's team's manipulation.” I look around at the blank white walls that look to extend forever in both directions.

“But it could be anywhere,” Grace says, her voice cracking, “behind either of the walls, the floor, the ceiling.”

Somewhere down the hallway, we hear the creak of wood, the turn of a knob.

“That has to be Gavin coming for us,” Grace whispers. She looks fearfully at Ral, then Billy, then me. “I think we run.”

As a door swings open down the hall, Ral turns to his right, commands the words of power, “
Door emerge, conjure hallway
.” Another door etches itself into the plaster wall, and a doorknob jumps out from the wood. Ral swings the door open, steps into another long corridor, and we follow and slam the door behind us.

We race down Ral's bare-bones corridor as the hallway continues to unfurl itself, rolling forward through the clearing like a four-sided scroll.
But we can't keep running, hiding, getting lost forever—

And then the first tendrils of an idea start curling around my mind.
If we can find Stock, Mama's caging spell, sacrificing my blood, maybe I could convince him
—

I need to stop for a second. I need to sort this out.

I fall to my hands and knees as my teammates stutter-step in front of me. I utter words of power, and a small trapdoor emerges on the ground. But this time, when I open the flap, I reveal an eight-by-eight-foot dark crawl space.

“What are you suggesting, we just crawl in there and hide?” Billy demands.

“You want to keep running until they catch us or we fall over?” I ask. “We need to come up with a better strategy.”

Billy shakes his head but still lowers himself down into the crawl space. Once he's in, he lends Grace a hand, and then me. Ral closes the trap shut above all of us. I wave my hand around the perimeter of the trap to conceal it.

I crouch down, lean my head against the cool stone wall of the dark crawl space. Billy stretches his legs out as Grace and Ral slide down beside us.

Grace closes her eyes, puts her fingers to her temples, and frowns. “I hear them. They're not far away.” We all fall silent, listen for Grace's amplification to reach our ears. Sure enough, in a few moments I hear the pitter-patter of footsteps. Another minute, and there's a loud chorus of approaching thuds above us.
They're close
.

“Running isn't working,” I whisper into the dark.

Ral cuts in, “If you've got a better plan than trying to stay alive, I'm all ears.” Ral's never snappy, never quick, and the fact that he is now just drives his fear,
my
fear, home.

“We need to get on the offensive,” I say softly. “We need to find Stock, convince him to align with us.” I pause. “And I think I should go alone, while you three stay here.”

“
What?
” Grace whispers.

“Joan, that's suicide,” Ral says.

I shake my head. What I'm going to attempt to do—what I
need
to do—I have to do alone. “I'll move faster on my own,” I say, “and if I can manage to pull Stock away from the others, I might have a way to convince him.”

“Please, be more vague, Kendrick,” Billy huffs.

But I'm not explaining Mama's caging spell right now. I'm not sharing that thanks to my mother's dark, questionable blood-magic, I might be able to scare the hell out of Stock and save our skins. “You're going to have to trust me.”

“You heard Gavin, it's over. His team already allied with Stock,” Grace says.

I shake my head. “Promises can always be broken.”

A second, another minute more, and the footsteps that have faded become louder, as if the crowd above us is retracing their steps, homing in on us slowly.

“Let her go,” Ral finally says.

Grace balks. “What? No.”

“She's strong enough to try,” Ral persists, without looking at
me. “If Joan can't find Stock, win him over, we're finished. And none of us want to die inside this magic.”

I don't wait for an answer. I lean over and squeeze Grace's hand before scrambling into a crouched position. “Do you hear anything right now?”

She looks at me for a long while, a silent protest. Finally she shakes her head, closes her eyes, and whispers, “It's distant. Footsteps. No one's right above us now.”

I exhale the breath I've been holding on to. “Stay here. If you sense anyone coming your way, make a trapdoor within the trapdoor. And keep this one. I'm gonna need it.” I scramble to stand and spellbind the trapdoor with a linked trick, “
Out becomes in
.”

Then I push open the trap, close the concealed door behind me, and leave our crawl space to run back down the hall. I know where I need to get to. Somewhere visible. An open space where Stock can see me alone, where I look easily overpowered.

I race back through the hallway Ral has created, heart and feet pounding, until it dead-ends back at his magic-made door. I thrust it open, and I'm back in the main whitewashed hallway—the one where we first entered this living, breathing house of magic. I have to get back to the atrium, up to the balcony, a place where anyone looking for us can see.

I make a right, rush down the hallway and then stop, breathless, and face off with the right-side wall. “
In becomes out
,” I whisper, completing my linked trick, and setting up a future escape. A door crackles and rumbles into creation out of the plaster. I grab the door handle and open the door to the atrium.

The marble floor now has a chasm running through it from Gavin's trick. My staircase still hovers above it, floating to the balcony. A few feet away, Gavin's bridge arches from the floor to the balcony like a sad rainbow. I sidestep around the huge chasm in the floor, until I get to the bridge. Then I take it up.

I wait on the balcony, panic building inside me as I try to remember Mama's caging spell, the words I said her final night, the way I managed to lock my magic inside that bottle of sorcerer's shine. I need her powerful magic of last resort—I need her imprisoning spell to
force
Stock into an alliance with us. I close my eyes, and my pulse starts throbbing underneath my skin, like it knows what's coming—
a draw of blood, my sacrifice to the magic, blood gashed across the lock—

Then words from the past float out of the dark of my mind like an eerie beacon.
Less of me, an offering to cage for eternity—

There're squeaks on the floor below me, whispers. My eyes fly open, and I look to the perimeter of the chasm below.

“You lose your pack, she-wolf?” Stock calls up. He's standing on the edge of the huge gash in the floor, Tommy and Rose right behind him. One of Gavin's Carolina Boys, James, is with them. I let out a sigh of relief. They might have teamed up, like Gavin told us, but it looks like Stock's team hasn't found Gavin and the rest of his men in here—at least not yet.

“I came to talk to you,” I call down.

“So talk,” Stock yells.

“Alone.”

“What do you think I am, stupid?”

I throw him a taunting smile. “You afraid?”

At that, Stock's face rearranges into something uglier, and he turns back to Tommy, Rose, and James, mumbles words I'm sure I don't want to hear, and begins to ascend the bridge. “Got to say I've been looking forward to this moment, Kendrick, for a long, long time,” he says as he climbs. I put my left hand into my coat pocket, whisper, “
Conjure switchblade
,” and cold, sharp metal presses into my hand inside the wool. With one hand, I separate the blade from the handle.
Please, let this work. Please let Mama's magic—my family's magic—save us.

Then, before I lose my nerve, I press the blade lightly into my palm. A shock of pain pulses under my skin; then a rush of warm liquid curls around my fingers.

Stock steps off the bridge and onto the balcony. When he's only steps away from me, I begin. I whisper words of power, and a large, transparent box builds itself like a cage around us, four walls, a ceiling, and a floor, an entire box made of glass, no more than five feet long and wide, and maybe six feet tall.

“You want to be alone with me this bad?” Stock smirks. He looks through the glass and down to Tommy, Rose, and James, who stand, necks craned, staring up at us. “Kinky with the glass windows.”

He raises his hands, whether to dispel the glass or end me, I'm not sure, because without another breath, I take my bleeding hand and press it against the glass, run it around the entire box like a thin, smeared, red border.

Stock gives a weird laugh. “What the hell?”

“
Less of me
 . . .” I whisper the old words of Mama's caging spell, hope to God the magic answers me once more.

“What is this? What are you doing?”

“
An offering to cage for eternity
 . . .”

“What are you mumbling? Some backwoods trash spell?”

“My wish, to cage us forever, or until I release us
.”

Immediately, the space feels tighter, like all air has gone out from the box, like we're inside one big soul-crushing void.

“What just happened?” Stock says, panic creeping into his voice. He turns to the glass wall behind him, draws a finger frantically in the shape of a door—but nothing happens.
Because nothing can happen
.
Because Mama's dark magic worked. I made it work.
Fear, adrenaline, pride, it all thunders inside, gives me a thick, heady rush.