The Magician's Mistake (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 1) (6 page)

The music beat louder, and a chanting whisper grew up around us. I looked around the room, and saw the henchwomen chanting. Women across the room took it up and began chanting, too. A simple verse.

The full moon rises,

And with it our power,

United, we are sisters. United.

I bit back the urge to scream at all of them to shut up. The inane chant opened them and made it much, much easier for this Jennifer to use my amulet to take their power. Even though none of them were true witches, and none of them had much magic, they were all alive. And all of them, all together
…
.

As the chanting grew, and more women took it up, strands of magic began to waft upward and drift toward a far corner of the second floor. I saw something up there, a glowing form in the darkness, small and hunched over. She swayed and held out my amulet which grew brighter as the magic flowed into it. I snarled and waded faster through the crowd. I pushed through the last layer of women, and stood suddenly beside the cage.

Lila and Adam lay on the ground inside the cage, moaning.

A woman beside me laughed. “Don’t look so serious, sister. They’re actors. Jennifer always stages elaborate scenes at her rituals.”

Lila’s hair was plastered to her sweating face and her body jerked and twisted, seizing as bright strands of orange and gold magic were pulled out of her forcefully. Melted eyeliner and mascara gave her raccoon eyes, and her Emily the Strange t-shirt was ripped open at the neck. Beside her lay Adam, naked and half-wolf with wrongly-jointed arms and legs, a wolfish beard, and a snout protruding from his face. His eyes were half-open but unseeing as he yipped and pawed the ground around him. A dog having a bad dream. A very bad dream. His life magic, yellow and tawny, drifted up from him as well.

I had seen more than enough. I opened my purse and grabbed one of my lightning orbs. I readied to throw it upward. Unless Jennifer was a better witch than I suspected, it would distract her while I rose up toward her and unfurled some true wickedness on her.

Just before the quartz ball left my hand, I spied a glimmer of magic above the room. A pale brown spell covered the room like a bubble and separated us from the second floor. It blended in with the low light and was nearly invisible. I snarled. The witch had come prepared. The barrier was a fairly simple spell, yet it would be effective at bouncing back any spell I threw in its direction. I would have to find a different way to fight this Jennifer. Or get her to come to me.

Lila moaned as a too-thick strand of magic came off her. The girl was more than she seemed, and had powers and depths she did not yet know about, but still, she was an entirely mortal creature. And Adam? He howled quietly as his bones popped and creaked. The full moon outside must have been rising. His muscles clenched and his jaw ground together as he turned more wolf than man. Dark strands of tangled magic unfurled from him.

I had to move fast. I glanced at the nearest exit that led to the stairs and the second floor. It would take time to get there, and more time to dispose of the minion guarding it. Time I didn’t have.

I took a leaping jump and landed on top of the cage. I yelled, “Hear me, witch. I have come as you have requested. Now free my acolyte and face me, if you dare.”

A wheezing, hissing laugh filled the air. “Morgan le Stupid. How convenient that you are idiotic enough to have come,” spoke an old woman’s voice. “Initially this was my first necessary act to increase my power before I hunted you down. But now I get to kill all the birds with one stone. Lovely.”

“Words, words, words,” I said and squinted upward, trying to get a better look at her, but the amulet glowed too bright and hid her form behind it. More magic, more life force, from every woman in the room flowed upward and into the amulet. I raised my hand and touched my pinky to my lips, murmuring “Arnofio”. It activated a levitation spell. Slowly I rose into the air. I held my spelled oak branch in both hands over my head. Its protection would shield me and get me through the magical barrier Jennifer had placed across the ceiling, I thought.

I’d thought wrongly.

A thousand bees stinging every inch of my skin would have been pleasant compared to the spell pounding and biting into my person. I growled and pushed, trying, trying to get through to the other side of it.

I fell out of the air and landed hard on top the cage. Most of me whimpered in pain, but a small part noticed this was the best magic I’d faced in centuries. Interesting. I jumped up to standing, wide-legged and pissed off.

All around me, women applauded my levitation and fall. They chanted louder. More damn power flowed up to Jennifer. Here and there, across the wide room, women collapsed. Fainting and seizing. Crying out and then going still and silent. She wouldn’t kill them, would she?

“If it’s power you seek, free them and I will give you mine. All of it. It is yours to take. I vow it if you let everyone go.”

“Oh, Morgan. You always did love coming to the rescue of commoners. That is, when you weren’t poisoning the world with your nasty magic, destroying men, and stealing my boyfriend.” Dozens of more women fell across the room. Lila cried out in pain.

I blinked. Stealing her boyfriend? My memory had holes in it, but
…
I would remember stealing another witch’s boyfriend, wouldn’t I? Stealing lovers was not really my style. I’d always found there were more than enough men to go around.

“You’ll have to refresh my memory. Do I know you?” I asked.

I felt her boiling rage above me, bright and hot.

“Give me time, and you will. You will come to understand that I am here to destroy you once and for all.” Jennifer cackled witchily.

“Words, words, words,” I muttered. I looked down through the cage’s bars and saw that Lila and Adam’s auras looked much, much dimmer.

I slitted my eyes in the dusky light and stared up at Jennifer, willing myself to remember, to have any context at all as to what was going on. As I studied her, power from the amulet began to pulse out from it and snake up the witch’s arms. The stolen magic covered her body in lines of shining, bright light. The brightness illuminated her, and I saw the ancient lady become merely old, and then middle-aged, and then younger still. Years fell off her face as I watched.

“You steal their lives to lengthen your own?” I said. “That’s vile. Reprehensible.”

All around the room, more women fell to the ground. Some of them cried out before losing consciousness.

“Nothing to worry about,” Jennifer said loudly. “Everyone here is getting blessed with the magic of the full moon. Some find it overwhelming.” Her voice echoed across the room.

Lots of women nodded. They wanted to believe, and so they did.

It was long past time to end this. “Gadael,” I yelled, as I threw up my oaken protection spell. It could protect them all for a short time. It hung above me, and the doorways were no longer spelled, and the witch above us could not take any more of their magic or hurt them in any way. “Cofio,” I called out, and kissed my pointer finger. I spun in a slow circle, pointing at the different henchwomen manning the doors.
Remember, remember,
my spell whispered to them as confusion and then anger fell across their faces.

“Leave. All of you. Morgan le Fay, child of the Isle of Apples, sister to Arthur and subject of none, commands it. Flee, I say!” My voice was not spelled, but it was used to being obeyed.

The Center House emptied within minutes. I jumped off of the cage and worked on unlocking it as the women left. The spell on the lock was a tangled knot, and try as I might, I couldn’t undo it before my protection spell faded above us.

“Now. Come to me, Jennifer. We finish this.”

10

A Dark Magic

“Let them run,” Jennifer said. “I took more than enough magic from them to best you.” She came to the railing on the second floor and jumped over it. She floated slowly down. As her feet touched the spell which had kept me from getting to her, the spell wrapped around her body. Layer upon layer of the protection covered her entire body.

She held up the pulsing amulet in one hand. Strands of magic swirled out of the amulet and into her as she grew younger and younger. “Some of us do not have the luxury of Grail magic for our immortality. Some of us have done what we must, over the centuries.” Her feet, in high heeled leather boots, landed lightly on the ground.

Grail magic?

As in, the
Holy Grail
?

Was that the secret to my immortality? I knew that it was tied to magic, but when I tried to think of the details, the memory faded away in mist. Usually. But now I saw
—

A cup of iron. Filled with sweet water. A hum as I sipped it. Laughter on my lips.

The Grail. I saw it in my mind’s eye, clear and unclouded by any failure of memory. I sensed its magic deep in my bones and wrapped through my tissue. The Grail. The cup of cups. Yet I had no memory of how I came to hold it, or who had been laughing beside me when I did.

And no matter my long years, I should remember that, shouldn’t I? A dizziness raced through me. I gritted my teeth and willed it away. I put myself between the witch and the two moaning bodies behind me.

Keep it together, Morgan
, I thought.
There will be time enough later for losing your mind.

I cleared my throat. “So you steal the lives of women across the country, is that it, Jennifer? You promise them sisterhood, and then murder them for your own vanity?”

“Oh please. You’ve gotten so righteous in your old age, Morgan. As though murder and mayhem were not your bread and butter. No need to worry about the commoners. There’s a rare death, here and there, but it’s way too much work to cover them up in this modern era of detectives and prisons. I prefer to leave them insane and disfigured.” She smiled prettily and grew younger still. Thirty-five. Magic flowed in undulating ribbons out from the amulet and into her.

I longed to throw every nasty spell I had at her.

None of them would make it past her protection spell.

She spoke on. “And you should know I haven’t been holding ceremonies everywhere I go just for my beauty, Morgan. I needed vast amounts of magic to make a finding spell huge enough to find you. To break through the layers of deception you set up so that I could hunt you down and give you everything you deserve.”

“Layers of deception?” I echoed. I had set them up, so others wouldn’t find me? That made sense
—
my years and years in Seattle had been peaceful, and yet I did not remember those spells were in place.

A memory pulsed through me, of desperation and deep magic making.

Not now,
I thought forcefully.
Focus.

I blinked and studied the protection spell around Jennifer. It would keep out any of my spells, but it let the raw magic from the amulet through. A smile grew on my lips as I watched Jennifer grow younger. Her face. That face. I knew her. I
—

Images flew out at me from the dark and forgotten corners of my mind.

A primitive castle, newly made of rough-hewn stone. The smell of bread and roasting pig. Running down cold hallways and laughing. Collecting baskets full of daisies for the festival of new life. An image of her, this Jennifer, sitting up straight in a tall and uncomfortable chair, drinking mead from a metal chalice and staring at me as though I was a dirty thing. A wrong thing. And standing behind her, a man in a long, gray cloak. A man of blue eyes, kind eyes, and long fingers. He
—

I cried as I fell to the ground. Dizzy. Unmoored. What was this foul magic? How had she gotten past all my wards without even tripping any of them and how was she making me remember things I’d long forgotten? I lay where I’d fallen, breathing, and running my palms over the smooth concrete ground, letting it bring me back to the real. The present.

Jennifer laughed at me.

I pushed myself up to sitting. The witch muttered and waved her hands through the air as she held the amulet, my amulet.

“Do you know me yet, Morgan?”

“Guinevere,” I whispered, the word falling like stones from my mouth. She was real back then and real now. Not some imagined iconic princess of Malory’s quill.

Guinevere stood before me, another as old as me. Another from the age of Arthur. I should remember her. What in five hells was wrong with my mind?

And she had tracked me down because I’d stolen her
…
boyfriend? “About the boyfriend,” I said, still disoriented and needing a moment to breathe and think before I could be focused enough to act. “You do remember that Arthur was my half-brother, yes? And as I recall, you screwed up that relationship all on your own, or should I say you screwed the lovely Lancelot, loudly and often until you were discovered.”

Her cheeks turned red and she gave me the nastiest smile I’ve ever seen in all my centuries. “Arthur? Are you mad? Touched by dementia? That would actually explain a lot: how it was so hard to find your essence in the world. Perhaps there is little of the true Morgan left in you.”

Her words worried me. I snarled. “Or perhaps it’s just that you are a terrible witch.” I took a deep breath and tried to focus, here and now, on what must be done. Pricks of memories stabbed at me, begging me to pay attention to them.