The Potioneer (Shadeborn Book 3) (5 page)

October

Dance Like The Devil

If there was one thing that Lily could always be certain of, it was that Novel believed in the old adage ‘the show must go on’. Despite Salem’s continued attempts to break free of his bedroom and procure himself a neat and tidy death, and despite the building tension between Lily and Novel, she still found the illusionist in the attic, undertaking his Saturday rehearsal as usual. She could hear him even as she was traversing the long, winding corridors that led to the rehearsal space, for his feet beat out a thundering rhythm on the tired old floorboards.

He had left the door open, and a great fan of flames shot out of the archway seconds before Lily stepped up to it. Novel wore a short-sleeved shirt, white with black braces, and his focus was solely on the floor before him, where he watched his own feet move to a tune that only he could hear. Lily marvelled, as she always did when he danced, admiring the perfect syncopation of his footfalls and the sway in his hips, back and arms as he rotated in the routine. Every now and then, those flames returned, surrounding him like the fiery feathered wings of a phoenix.

Novel’s pace grew quicker, and soon it was hard for Lily to follow his steps at all, though the illusionist still trained his eyes upon his feet. Curls of his pure white hair were slicked in sweat from the physical effort, hanging down about his forehead as his pale brows grew heavy in concentration. The flames rose higher around him, dancing and multiplying in volumes that matched the increase in his speed, and soon he was spinning and stamping with such ferocity that Lily could hardly see him within the cyclone of fire. It seemed to her that every step brought him closer to the brink of an explosion, like the raw, unkempt energy of his movements was crackling with static in the air of the small room.

“Novel!”

She called his name, and the flames sunk to the floor. The illusionist was within them, panting and heaving as he looked up in shock. It seemed to Lily that he had lost himself in the dance, and the music that no-one but he could hear. When he registered that she had been watching him, Novel even looked a little ashamed. It wasn’t a look that Lily liked to see on him, particularly since the first time she’d ever witnessed it was some forty feet below where they stood now, deep in the earthy catacombs on which the Imaginique was built. Deep in the darkness, where a pair of blood-soaked lips had been inches from the illusionist’s wrist.

“Forgive me,” Novel breathed, “it’s a new routine.”

“Looks good,” Lily answered honestly, “though I’d tone it down a little, unless you want to set the stage on fire.”

Novel gave her a smile, and it was the barest twitch in one corner of his mouth. He straightened out his braces and stood upright, one hand sweeping his hair back into its usual austere style. That one wayward curl, however, sprang forward again, the one that Lily had often found her eyes drawn to in the year that she had known him. A quiet desperation was building within her as she stepped towards him, and she threw herself suddenly into his arms, her hands clasping his torso tightly.

When he held her close, Lily felt a wave of relief run through her nerves. There had been so much strangeness between them that she’d feared for a moment he might run from her touch. Novel nestled his chin against her hair, and she felt his laboured breathing as his strong chest rose and fell alongside her fluttering heart. The tighter she held him, the more she felt the familiar thrill of magic pulsing in her blood. The Kindred Flame was burning in a faint orange glow, encircling the pair where they stood in a silent embrace for several moments.

“Please,” Lily whispered, “won’t you tell me what’s going on?”

Novel pulled back, but he didn’t let Lily go. His hands came to rest on her biceps where he beheld her at arm’s length, studying her face with those pale eyes of his. Lily saw that they were not frosted, or closed to her investigation in the usual way. They looked stressed and filled with no small amount of sorrow, as the illusionist inhaled a deep and shuddering breath.

“You used to trust me,” Novel told her.

“I trusted you completely,” Lily began, a lump forming in her throat, “but that was before I found you feeding a vampire in the secret basement tomb.”

That shameful look returned to Novel’s features, where his mouth turned down and small worry lines appeared at the outer edges of his eyebrows. His grip on Lily was fading a little, his fingers growing weaker where they touched her, but he still did not let go.

“Can’t you trust me to fix this on my own?” Novel asked.

“So there
is
something going on,” Lily said, feeling the echo of Jazzy’s words as they came to her own lips. “Something bad?”

Novel looked away, tight-lipped and turning frosty, as he always did when she dared to challenge him.

“You do this every time,” she chided, her chest tense with a myriad of emotions. “You think that you can take care of everything alone, and what happens when you do?”

Again, he would not answer her, and now Lily was the one that broke the last fragile touch of their embrace. She walked out of his arms and put distance between them in the small rehearsal space, her footfalls kicking up dust on an invisible breeze. An accusing finger found his face, and though he looked hurt, Novel had slipped his mask of pride back over every stoic feature, save for his gleaming eyes.

“I’ll tell you what happens,” Lily continued bitterly. “You get put out of action, and I’m left with no idea how to fight. You don’t give me warning of what’s coming, because you know you can handle it, but what happens when you’re not here?
I died, Novel.
I died because you weren’t here.”

This, Lily knew, was the reason that Novel hadn’t wanted to hear the ‘d’ word over the last few weeks, and she saw how it stung him, how he flinched when she used it with such accusation. She felt awful instantly, because he was not the one who’d caused her death, and he had been the one to revive her too. But the words were spoken, and they could not be taken back. Novel glanced down to his side, where one pale fist was clenched in growing fury. Lily saw the lightning that sparked from his palm, and the little sprouts of electricity fed back into his skin, leaving those spindly, fern-like Lichtenberg marks wherever they shocked him. It was his guilt showing in his magic, and Lily pushed her pride aside to approach him again.

“Just let me in,” she pleaded, “let me know what the problem is. We can face it together this time.”

Novel nodded, but his next words were not what Lily had hoped for.

“Give me until the end of this month,” he said gently. “If I can’t find the solution, I’ll tell you everything, I promise.”

“A promise is no good to me,” Lily answered, tears finally choking her throat as she bit them back. “You can either be a man who keep secrets, or a man I can trust. Not both, Novel. Never both.”

And she left him standing there in the darkening, empty attic. As Lily strode away, it was her turn to feel the bite of guilty lightning when it sparked against her palms.

The Wandering Girl

Novel’s four-poster bed was usually empty at night, for the illusionist kept strange hours, and liked to absorb starlight on the Imaginique’s roof around midnight. It was at this strike of twelve that Lily settled between the soft black sheets of the bed, and reached a pale hand out to draw the crimson curtains all around her. After a few weeks of returning to the term-time lecture schedule, the shattered student had finally given up on making every night a late one. Tomorrow, Lily’s history lecture with Bradley Binns was set for nine a.m. sharp, and she was determined that she wouldn’t fall asleep in this one.

It felt lonely to lie there without the familiar weight of the body that ought to be beside her, and Lily turned on her side to face the curtained veil she had drawn, so she didn’t have to look at the space where Novel usually lay. If things kept up the way they were with university, there was a very real possibility that he and Lily may end up sharing the bed in shifts rather than together, and if he didn’t keep his promise to her at the end of October, then Lily had to admit it was probably for the best. A heaviness shifted in her chest at that sad realisation, sitting somewhere between her heart and her throat as she wrestled with her comfort, and the thoughts that were already threatening to keep her awake.

Somewhere, in a fanciful part of her mind, Lily had assumed that being Kindred Souls – the shadeborn equivalent of soul mates – automatically meant that the course of true love would run smooth for her and Novel. Now, in the great anti-climax that had settled since he’d saved Lily from the brink of death, she was starting to wonder if the whole soul mate thing was purely about the magic. As much as she was drawn to Novel’s bright eyes, his sharp-angled features and the mastery he possessed when he performed, he was difficult to live with, even at the best of times. She loved him – of that she was certain – but loving someone, and being with them, so totally
with them
, were two very different things.

“You look troubled.”

The voice that spoke was reluctant, and a little hoarse, but it still made Lily leap half out of her skin. The silken sheets fluttered away as she jolted, eyes wide open and looking for the source of the words. When she remembered that she had closed the crimson curtains of the bed all around her, panic set in, freezing her in place where she lay on her side. Her lips ran dry in seconds, and she had to move them to and fro a little before they ceased trembling enough for her to ask the empty air before her.

“Is someone there?”

“In a manner of speaking,” the voice replied, sounding deeper, and a little bolder.

Lily reached towards the curtains, but the voice grew louder still.

“Ah, I wouldn’t do that,” it suggested, “I might lose my place here.”

Slowly, realisation sank in, and Lily knew the voice and its owner. She let her eyes rove over the dark, shadowed folds of the crimson curtain before her, until she found a place where the velvety material had crumpled into a kind of knot. Here, two deep shadows sat side by side, with one dark crease of fabric spread beneath them in a long, dragging shape. The combination of the shadows looked something like the face from Scream, until the two shadowed eyes blinked, and the crease below them broke into a smile.

“I’m sorry, Gerstein,” Lily said, honing in on the shadows, “I forget that you can do this.”

“Anything that forms a face,” the simulacra replied with another folded smile. “Forgive me. I’m not spying on you, my dear. I did come to pass a message, but you looked so terribly forlorn.”

“What’s the message?” Lily interjected, keen not to return to the subject of her sadness.

Gerstein’s illusionary features became tense with worry for a moment, his voice dropping to that low, uncertain tone once more.

“It’s concerning your friend, Miss Dama,” the apparition began. “I thought you might like to know that she’s out of her wheelchair… it appears she’s making an attempt to climb the stairs.”

Lily’s first thought was of Jazzy as she used to be, and in her mind she saw the short Indian girl padding up the Imaginique’s winding staircases in her striped Where’s Wally socks. The vision passed swiftly, though, as Lily saw reality for what it was. Jazzy had a severed spine, and if she was clambering, using only her upper body to climb the daunting mountain of steps before her, then she was in some kind of trouble.

“Thank you,” Lily said swiftly, and she scooted downwards to shoot from the end of the bed, so as not to disturb Gerstein from his station in the curtains.

As her bare feet slapped the floorboards towards the door, she heard the watchman call after her: “Meet you down there.”

The simulacra travelled through the walls at a much faster pace than Lily’s exhausted frame would allow, and she spotted him settled into a theatre poster as she approached the lowest staircase of the Imaginique. This was the place where the stairs connected to the corridor of the grand foyer, and Gerstein had taken on the guise of a hand-drawn skeleton on the poster, about halfway up the stairs. He pointed hurriedly downwards with one spindly finger and there, in the darkness, Lily beheld her friend.

Jazzy’s eyes flashed at her, two deep black pools that glistened with tears borne of frustration. Her legs hung limply behind her where the girl had made it halfway up the stairs, and she strained to push her top half up the next step, one hand reaching wildly for Lily’s assistance. Lily rushed to Jazzy’s side and hoisted, her gravity magic racing out in that graceful way that she only possessed when she was casting by accident, and soon the two girls were perched on the centremost step of the stairs, with Gerstein in the poster right above their heads.

“Look,” Jazzy gasped, clutching at the v-neck of her Ghostbusters pyjamas.

Lily was still holding fast to her friend’s arm, but Jazzy fought her way from her grip to point back up the stairs, into the empty blackness of the first floor landing from which Lily had descended. Jazzy’s fingers trembled as she found her breath, her deep eyes pooling with dampness once more in a pained effort to speak.

“They don’t notice me, ever, but…
She
led me out here. I had to follow. Don’t you see her?”

Lily watched Jazzy’s fearful face as she spoke these words, but when she glanced to where her friend pointed, Lily saw only the darkness of the landing beyond. There were lights under a few doors on the corridor, and somewhere on the ground floor below them, the kitchen was filled with the chatter of the theatre’s most nocturnal souls. When she glanced up to the poster where the skeleton simulacra stood, Gerstein was looking down at them both from within the frame. His bony shoulders gave a shrug.

“Don’t ask me,” he said, “I can only see the living.”

Jazzy shook her head, her neck drooping weakly as she lost the remainder of her strength.

“She’s not…” The girl stumbled over her words, tiny teeth biting on her lip for a moment in thought. “She’s more than a memory, Lily. She’s important.”

Lily looked again to the empty space where Jazzy had pointed, and a cool shiver trickled against her spine within her thin nightclothes. Even though there was life in the people and creatures all around them in the theatre, they were still just two frightened girls in the dark. When Jazzy looked up again to the ghost’s last location, she shook her head of wayward curls and gave a pitiful little laugh.

“She’s gone,” she whispered. “She must have realised that I can’t follow her. Stupid legs.”

This last was whispered sharply, and almost lost in the deafening noise as Jazzy took her fists and thumped them hard against her limp thighs. She did it twice more before Lily could catch her wrists to stop her.

“Quit that,” Lily whispered, “you’ll give yourself bruises.”

“What does it matter?” Jazzy asked. “It’s not like I can feel them.”

Lily’s heart sank with a selfish thud. She was worrying about boyfriends, true love and magic, whilst Jazzy was haunted and struggling in the darkness alone. Lily stood up straight and forced every drop of her power to focus, lifting Jazzy so that she floated level with her. The magic seemed to ease the strain from her best friend’s face, and Lily walked them both down the stairs, back towards the prop store that had been transformed into Jazzy’s bedroom.

“Come on,” Lily prompted, “I’ll make you a cuppa. Sugar, no milk. Just how you like it.”

“I thought you had a lecture in the morning?” Jazzy asked in a small, weak-sounding voice.

Lily smiled forlornly and shook her head.

“Something tells me tonight wasn’t made for sleeping,” she mused. “Besides, I think I’d better hear everything about this ghost girl you saw.”