The Darkest Magic (A Book of Spirits and Thieves) (3 page)

“Step back from him,” Barnabas hissed at her.

She kept her attention fully fixed on the assassin. “No, Barnabas, let me handle this. You’ve done enough.”

Goran stopped, an arm’s reach away from Maddox and Damaris. A smile curled up the corners of his mouth. “You mean what you say, don’t you? You wish to find a peaceful solution to this.”

Damaris raised her chin. “I do.”

“I don’t have many weaknesses, especially not now,” he said, looking down at his fresh marks, “but one of them is for brave women who stand up for what they believe. Who protect what they love. I admire that more than I can say.”

Amazed, Maddox watched this exchange. Would his mother be able to stop this assassin, using only words as her weapons?

Damaris nodded firmly. “Good.”

Goran’s smile widened. “Luckily, I learned to ignore my weaknesses long ago.”

The silver blade caught the flickering lantern light as Goran slashed Barnabas’s dagger forward, cutting Damaris’s throat in a single, deep line.

“Mama, no!” Maddox caught her as she dropped to the floor,
her hands flying up in vain to try to block the flow of blood. She sought Maddox’s gaze, her eyes full of pain and regret. Barnabas was there too, next to his sister and clutching her hand.

Goran glared down at him. “Come with me now, boy, and no one else has to die here.”

Maddox tore his gaze away from his dying mother to send a wave of cold death toward this murderer. Goran’s eyes widened in pain as he dropped the bloody dagger and clutched at his throat. He staggered backward, his face convulsing and turning red.

“What—?” he gasped. “Your power . . . it’s so much . . . stronger. . . .”

He fell to his knees as Maddox twisted the magic like a black knife, and blood began to pour from the assassin’s nose.

The tavern had transformed from a den of wine-soaked revelry to a pit of chaos. The patrons had realized their lives were in peril, and they flooded toward the exit, blocking Maddox from the killer. By the time they cleared out, Goran was nowhere to be seen.

The assassin had escaped.

“Damn it,” Barnabas said, his voice pained and shaky. “Damn it all. And damn Valoria for this!”

Hot tears streaked down Maddox’s cheeks. Damaris weakly clutched his arm.

“I’m sorry,” Maddox choked out. “Mama, I’m so sorry. Forgive me.”

He gazed down at Damaris for as long as he could. Apart from the pain in his mother’s tear-filled eyes, there was only love. Peace.

And then her gaze went blank, her expression still and lifeless.

Maddox pulled his mother’s limp body against him and sobbed against her shoulder. The sheer force of his anguish reached outward, and his magic shattered every window in the tavern.

CRYSTAL

T
ORONTO
—P
RESENT
D
A
Y

B
ecca had started to twitch, her expression growing tense, her forehead furrowing, and little pained gasps escaped her lips.

Little sisters were a lot like kittens. It was pretty easy to tell when one was having a nightmare.

“No, please, no,” Becca whimpered. “No, don’t!”

Crys sat up and shook her. “Hey. Wakey, wakey!”

Becca drew in a quick breath. Her eyelashes fluttered. She blinked a few times, her expression slowly turning into one of recognition as she registered Crys sitting on the side of her bed.

She frowned. “Were you watching me sleep again?”

“You make it sound so creepy.”

“It
is
creepy.”

“I’d rather think of it as watching over my kid sister so she isn’t yanked into a faraway fantasy world again. Like a guardian angel.”

Becca’s frown didn’t fade as she sat up, stretched, and glanced at the clock. “Is that really the time?”

“Yup.”

“It’s
noon
?”

“Well done. And here I thought that after a whole week away
from school you’d forget everything you ever learned. Oh wait, that’s just what Mom thinks will happen.”

From the corner of her eye, Crys saw Charlie, their black-and-white kitten, saunter into the room and sit down at her feet. He looked up at her and mewed, which she translated to mean: “Please pick me up.”

Crys reached down and did as requested, placing Charlie on top of the white duvet cover.

As Becca absently scratched his back, Charlie got down on his haunches and raised his tail high in the air, purring happily. “I had a horrible dream,” she said.

“I could tell. What about?”

“I was there again. In Mytica.”

Mytica.
The name of the fantasy land Becca claimed her spirit visited while, here in the real world, her body had been trapped in a coma. She kept telling Crys and their mother about it like it was real, like it all really happened. And Crys listened, allowing her to talk about it as much as she needed to.

She tried really hard to believe her sister, but seriously? Another world?

Crys would admit, albeit reluctantly, that she’d recently come to believe that magic books and evil sorcerers were real, but she still had her limits.

Anyway, playing along with this Mytica place was easy compared to what Becca had just gone through. The important thing was that Becca was safe. She believed her story was true, and the last thing Crys wanted to do was make fun of her for it. There were still plenty of things that were fair game for Crys to mock, but this was serious.

“Go on,” Crys said after a few moments of silence. “What about Mythica?”

“
Myt
-i-ca,” Becca corrected. “Not
Myth
-i-ca.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said! What happened in the dream?”

A pained, faraway look filled Becca’s dark blue eyes, which were much more serious than any other fifteen-year-old Crys had ever known. But Becca had always been the more serious sister. She was also the one who liked to correct her older sister’s grammar and pronunciation way too frequently.

“I was watching. The whole time. I wasn’t part of it, but I could hear noises coming from this tavern. I could smell, like, sweat and smoke and other nasty things.”

“Nice,” Crys said, trying unsuccessfully to make Becca smile.

“Maddox’s mother . . .” Becca inhaled sharply, her eyes growing glossy. “She’s dead. Her . . . her throat . . . that man cut it. Oh God. Poor Maddox!”

“Whoa, wait a minute. Calm down. It was just a dream, remember? Only a dream. Maddox is fine.”

Maddox. Aka Becca’s boyfriend from another world. Whenever she talked about him, she got this dreamy look in those serious eyes—which was new for her. As far as Crys knew, or at least as far as Becca had ever shared with her, she’d never crushed this hard on anyone before now.

Dream Boy was the first.

Then again, Crys and Becca hadn’t exactly been super close for the last few years.

The thought of all the time they’d wasted dug a painful hole deep inside of Crys. No, the time that
she’d
wasted, being a brat and a lousy sister ever since their father had left them to join Markus King’s secret Hawkspear Society. She’d hated Daniel Hatcher for turning his back on them, and what had she done? Taken it out on her mother and sister, the two family members who hadn’t left.

But Crys had always been her dad’s shadow. They used to share everything—a love of photography, sushi, books, and foreign films. He even used to talk politics with her, and Crys couldn’t think of any other kid whose father trusted her knowledge and opinions enough to engage in any kind of serious debate. But all of that was two years ago, before he left everything and everyone behind just to please Markus. Crys had only reconnected with him to find out the truth about Hawkspear, about her father’s role in it. And about just how deeply entwined her entire family history was with that of an immortal “death god.” This was what Markus liked others to believe he was so that they’d allow him to carve magical marks into their forearms with his golden dagger, believing it brought good health and not realizing that the main reason Markus did it was to ensure their unwavering loyalty and obedience.

Now Becca kept saying that Markus had stolen that same golden dagger from Mytica, from an evil goddess who desperately wanted it back.

Damn.
Crys wished she could believe Becca’s story completely. And it wasn’t that she didn’t trust her sister or thought she was going crazy. But Crys had always had a difficult time believing or trusting anything that she hadn’t seen or experienced for herself.

Which now unfortunately included knowing where her father was or whether he was safe. The last she’d seen of him, he was helping her and Becca escape from Markus with the Bronze Codex, the book that would allegedly restore Markus’s fading magical mojo.

Crys also had the book to thank for the fact that they weren’t at home above the bookshop right now and instead were crashing at a borrowed penthouse in Yorkville. The place belonged to one of Crys’s aunt Jackie’s associates, a British guy named Angus Balthazar, who had previously helped Jackie steal priceless artifacts—like
the Bronze Codex—in Europe. After their near-death experience at Hawkspear, Jackie had called Angus at his London flat to see if they could stay at his house in Toronto and wait out the trouble.

Though he’d had absolutely no problem with them staying and had even asked the condo’s security team to watch over them, Crys wasn’t ready to call him a hero—not yet. She didn’t really trust anybody except her own family, but all the same she had decided to hold off on judging Angus until she met him. Which would be soon—Jackie had just told them yesterday that he was en route to the place now to lend a hand. Jackie said Angus was an expert in all areas of magic, which was why she’d gone to him for any helpful insight he could offer on the Bronze Codex and how to use it to stop Markus once and for all.

They’d been holed up in the huge apartment for a week, under strict orders not to leave for fear that Markus would be lurking nearby, ready to snatch the sisters up and use them to blackmail Jackie and Julia into handing over the Codex. Julia had gotten them out of school with some lame story about them having to take an unexpected family trip. Crys had to laugh at that—she now had enough family time to last her a couple of lifetimes. As nice and ritzy as this place was, she was itching to get out and breathe some fresh air again. Gigantic balconies on the fiftieth floor totally didn’t count.

Still, cabin fever aside, she knew enough to take their current situation seriously. Possibly even more seriously than Becca did, which was saying something. Because Becca hadn’t seen all that Markus was capable of, how he could get people to do what he wanted. How his marked society members followed his every order without stopping for a second to question his motivations.

Markus may have had his entire following convinced that he
was a good man who wanted to make the world better, safer, more peaceful. But Crys saw him for what he really was: a power hungry freak who was beyond ancient, yet had the face and body of a young male model. And he wouldn’t think twice about killing anyone who got in the way of what he wanted most.

If he ever found out what Crys’s father had done . . .

Becca put her hand on Crys’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“Hmm? Oh, nothing.”

“You’re not as good of a liar as you think.”

“Fine. I’m worried about Dad,” Crys admitted, her voice now hoarse.

“I know,” Becca said in her most comforting tone. “But he can take care of himself. He’s been doing that for years.”

“I’d still feel better if he were here with us.”

“You know Mom and Jackie would never be okay with that. He’s still under Markus’s control, right? He helped us, but who knows how much pain and resistance he had to go through to defy Markus just that one time. He’s still dangerous to us.”

“The logical mind of Becca Hatcher.” Crys nodded, swallowing past the lump in her throat. “Present and accounted for.”

She knew what Becca said was true, but she couldn’t get it out of her mind. What her dad had risked. What he’d done to save them . . .

“Let’s try to think about something else,” Becca said in an upbeat manner, though her expression was still haunted by her nightmare. “Like . . . Angus’s library.” She slipped out of bed and pulled on a fuzzy blue bathrobe. “Let’s go check it out again.”

The only thing that was almost as fancy as—and definitely more interesting than—Angus Balthazar’s penthouse was his personal library.

Angus had tons of rare and impressive early editions in his library—Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, even a signed UK first edition of
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
, which Crys personally coveted. But he also had many unusual titles in his collection, most of which shared an undeniable theme: magic.

There were big tomes on witchcraft, Satanism, paganism, voodoo, séances, hauntings, exorcisms. Handwritten grimoires in dozens of different languages. Journals of real people accused of being witches in England and the States, who were sentenced for crimes that no one could really prove.

She explored the library with Becca for a few minutes, but her buzzing head became so distracted that she had to take a seat on one of the oversized leather armchairs in the center of the room. Becca kept searching the shelves until a title caught her eye. She took the big volume and sat on the floor, cross-legged, in front of Crys.

Then, with a jolt of tension to her gut, she thought back to that day—that horrible day when Becca’s interest was piqued by a different book, the Codex, which had arrived at the Speckled Muse wrapped in brown paper and string, mailed from England by Jackie herself. The book looked old, ancient, and was handwritten in a weird language Crys hadn’t recognized. She’d been unimpressed, but Becca was immediately taken with it. She’d grabbed hold of it, flipped though the pages . . . and then something had grabbed her,
literally
grabbed her, and she fell into a coma for over a week.

Well, to Crys it was a coma. To Becca, the Codex was a ticket to a magical place filled of witches, thieves, and beautiful boys.

Crys’s heartbeat quickly doubled, slamming against her ribcage. Her chest grew tight, and suddenly it became hard to breathe. It felt a whole lot like a panic attack—and she hadn’t had one of those since her father first left.

She tried to keep the thoughts at bay, but they stormed and whirled in her mind like a furious tornado.

Becca isn’t my sister.
She’s my cousin.

Becca is Aunt Jackie’s daughter, not my mother’s. And her real father isn’t my father—it’s Markus King.

Half-immortal. Half-magic. And she has no damn idea.

Crys lurched to her feet. Becca looked up at her with surprise.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Crys said quickly. “Nothing, really. You . . . you keep looking at the books. I’m going to go see what Mom and Jackie and Dr. Vega are up to downstairs.”

She was out of the library before Becca had a chance to respond.

Downstairs was a living room, a large study, and a kitchen that put the one they had in their small apartment above the bookshop to shame. Crys headed directly to the study, which was piled high with everything from Dr. Vega’s office at the university. Inside, she found Jackie sitting next to Dr. Vega, both of them bent over a thick manila file folder.

Dr. Uriah Vega, a renowned language expert and professor at the University of Toronto, was an old friend of Jackie’s. He had been trying valiantly to decipher the book. A week ago, he’d been beaten within an inch of his life by Markus’s minions, so he’d been invited to stay with Crys’s family as he healed and recovered his strength.

“Where’s Mom?” Crys asked.

Jackie looked up from the papers. “She went to the convenience store downstairs. For supplies.”

Her aunt was tall, blond, and beautiful. Just like Becca. The dark circles that had taken up residence under her eyes for the last couple of days marred her looks only a little.

“Good morning, Ms. Hatcher,” Dr. Vega said. He gave Crys a bright smile despite the fading bruises and bandages on his face. “You’re looking quite
determined
today.”

“I think I am. Jackie, can I speak to you privately please?”

“Of course.” Jackie’s smile was strained as she followed Crys to the kitchen.

Crys reached into the fridge to grab a can of Diet Coke.

“What is it?” Jackie asked.

“You need to tell Becca the truth,” Crys said. She liked to think of her characteristic bluntness as a personal virtue that saved everyone valuable time.

Jackie’s expression was suddenly pinched, and Crys knew her aunt knew exactly what she was talking about. “Not yet,” Jackie said.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not ready.”

“Not ready to . . . what? Face the truth? Admit to your past mistakes and live with the consequences? Take responsibility for your daughter? Let me know if I’m getting warmer.”