Twenty-Sided Sorceress 3 - Pack of Lies (12 page)

I lashed out with magic, recoiling from the acid eating away at me. Recoiling back into my own body. Bile rose in my throat and I vomited blood, barely turning my head to the side in time to avoid splashing Alek’s chest. The headache continued but my heart steadied and the feeling of my insides burning away faded.

That was not the way to heal someone with magic, apparently.

“Alek,” I said. “Tell me how to do this.”

No answer.

So much power, and here I was, helpless again. I got up, took a folded throw blanket from the narrow couch, and spread it over him. I found tissues and cleaned up my vomit as best I could before lying down next to Alek, pressing myself against him. His heart was still beating. He was still fighting.

I touched the puncture wound on his neck, imagined Eva luring Alek out to the quarry. What would she have told him? How did he not see her lies? I guessed that she would be very good at not quite lying. Did she have others helping her? No way to tell. Alek would have been vulnerable anyway. He didn’t like her, perhaps didn’t even trust her, but she was a Justice. They had both been sent by the Council. He would trust in that. Let her get close enough to shoot him in the back. To drive the poison needle into his flesh.

Tears choked my throat, burned my eyes. That bitch was going to die. I wanted to go find her, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave him. The least I could do was stay, keep trying with my magic to heal him. I pressed more power into him, not sinking into him with my mind but just letting magic flow into him. But I might as well have been channeling at a rock. A rock would have absorbed the magic better, probably.

Sorcerers can’t eat shifter hearts. They have a level of immunity to most kinds of magic and their power can’t transfer. The same thing that protected shifters from sorcery was preventing me now from helping him. The best I could do was kill him more quickly. I smashed that thought to pieces as I rubbed the tears from my eyes.

The door creaked open and Levi poked his head in, one hand on the door as though ready to flee and close it behind him if I snapped at him again.

“Jade,” he said softly. “Can we help?”

“No,” I said. “No one can.” Then I froze, a memory rising in me. Alek and Carlos roaring and crows falling from the sky, changing back to their human forms.

“Wait,” I said. “If he shifts, could he heal? Ask Vivian.”

“Yes,” she said, looking in at me from under Levi’s arm. “I think he is strong enough. But he can’t shift if he doesn’t wake up. I think there is too much damage.”

“But what if someone made him shift?” I asked.

“No one can force a shift on another,” Levi said.

“I’ve seen it. I watched Alek make crow shifters come back to human.”

Levi looked down at Vivian and they both shook their heads. “Perhaps that is a power the Council grants. I’ve never heard of such a thing, but Justices are special.”

“So we’d need a Justice?” I asked, defeat stabbing the hope in my heart to death. “I thought it might be an alpha thing.”

“No,” Vivian said.

The only Justice I had access to wouldn’t do it, I was sure of that. For a moment I indulged in a very violent fantasy of hunting her down and forcing her to make Alek shift, but I knew from the tiny bit of logic left in me that she would never cave. Eva had too much at stake if she was willing to kill another Justice.

“The Council, what about them?” I was grasping at very tiny straws but any glimmer of a chance…

“They do not directly interfere. We may as well ask Jesus Christ to intercede,” Levi said, a bitter note in his voice. I wondered at it but shoved the questions aside.

“Jade,” Vivian said. She licked her lips and glanced up at Levi again. “The Justice is strong. He’s suffering. He will take a long time to die. That isn’t right.”

“No,” I whispered. “It isn’t. Just…give me a few minutes. Let me say goodbye.”

My real words were unspoken.
Give me time to think. Give me time to figure out how to cheat my own personal hell, my own Kobayashi Maru
.

She nodded, and they left me alone with him again.

My magic was no good, not the way I wanted to use it. Bernard Barnes had been able to affect shifters with his magic. I didn’t want to think about the evil warlock who had nearly killed my friends, who had used dark rituals to bind shifters into their animal forms and turned them into living magic batteries for his use.

I hated touching his memories. The last time I had, I had done so quickly, using Bernie’s knowledge to lock Sky Heart into his human form, preventing him from fleeing Not Afraid’s wrath. I had been so full of rage, my heart full of images of death, that delving into Bernie’s power inside me hadn’t fazed me then. It had barely registered. Yet in so doing, in using Bernie’s knowledge, I had brought about the death of my father. Or at least, the man I’d thought was my father.

Bernie had been a serial killer. His psyche, and therefore his memories, were sick, full of things I didn’t want to see or experience, twisted experiments, a full spectrum of human suffering and death. A PowerPoint presentation in full sensory detail on how awful one being can treat another.

But somewhere in that knowledge could be my answer. If Bernie could lock a shifter into animal shape, he could force a shift. He had laid a magical trap that had nearly forced my friends to turn on each other, had pushed them to shift. Somewhere in the hellish miasma of his memories, there might be a way to save Alek.

I had to look.

I slipped my hands around Alek’s limp fingers, closed my eyes, and sank down into my own mind.

But the first memory that came wasn’t Bernie’s. It was my own.

“Come on in, Jess, I won’t bite,” Ji-hoon says. He sits at his drafting table, pen in hand. There is ink on his lip where he chews the pen nub while inking.

I slip into the room. I’m in trouble, I think. I lit a boy’s hair on fire with my mind. Pretty sure that was going to be the final straw. I don’t want to go back onto the street but at least I am a couple years older now. Stronger.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I lost control.”

“That boy called you some pretty awful names?” Ji-hoon has his own kind of magic, like how he always knows things. I know that the school called him, so it isn’t really magic, but something in his face calms me. He’s not mad.

It’s weird.

“I know that is no excuse,” I say, trying to show how mature I am. How I can take responsibility for my actions.

“The school can’t prove you did it, since all witnesses say you were standing ten feet away,” he says. “Relax.”

“But I hurt someone.”

“And you feel terrible about it, even though he was totally being an asshole. That’s good. The fire only burned his hair, from what the principal told me. So you stopped yourself, put it out, right?” He smiles at me and goes back to inking, putting clean black lines over his sketches, bringing the comic to life.

“I did, but…I don’t feel good. I feel like a freak, like a bigger asshole than he was.” Now I’m a little mad. I want him to tell me I’m a bad person. This power inside me, it isn’t normal. I couldn’t be like my real family, and now I’m not like my new one, either. I’m a freak.

“You don’t feel good because you
are
good,” Ji-hoon says. “Your magic is just magic, Jess. It is like lightning or the ocean. A part of the world. It can be harnessed and used for good or ill. But it just is. You choose. Today you chose to hurt. Now you know what that feels like. Tomorrow you can choose differently.”

“My magic hurt him,” I say.

“No,” he says. “You hurt him. Your magic is no more to blame for that than my pen is for creating this line.”

The memory faded and I sank deeper, cursing at my subconscious. It hurt to see Ji-hoon, even in my memories. I had buried that family, hiding them so I wouldn’t dream, wouldn’t hurt. Parts of myself felt like they were waking up now. Parts I wasn’t sure I wanted to see again, things I didn’t want to feel.

I shoved that away, too.

Bernard Barnes. Ah. There he was. Brown, thinning hair. Watery blue eyes. Pudgy, pale body. His memories started to flood me but I scoured through them, burning away the images, the impressions. Setting fire to every crime, every murder, every pain perpetrated by his choices, his use of the power he gained. I faced the deaths in my memories and rejected them. Not my actions, not my choices. They had no power over me, no more than death on a TV screen would.

I did not want those things, but I faced them unflinching. For Alek. For myself. What I was and who I was, as Ji-hoon had pointed out when I was way too young to listen, was up to me. My choices. Not Bernie’s, nor that boy who so long ago had looked at my brown skin and called me names.

I faced the pain and suffering Bernie had wrought and set it alight in my mind. I sought only his knowledge, the bright core of what he had learned. I wanted the tool, not its wielder. Ji-hoon was right. Power was power.

There, amidst the coals in my psyche, I found the knowledge I wanted. A ritual inscribed in an ancient book, a trap to set for men who could change their shape, forcing them from man to beast.

I am a sorceress. I have no need of ritual to raise power. I had Bernie’s power, now scrubbed clean and joined with my own. Just power. Just magic. A tool, a means to whatever end I wanted.

Balancing the scales, perhaps, a little more in favor of good. Not undoing what Bernie had done to gain such knowledge, not justifying it, but perhaps adding my own feather to the opposite side. Bernie had chosen to use the knowledge to bring death. I chose life.

I swam up to consciousness with the bit of knowledge clutched in my mental fist like a pearl. Alek still breathed beside me, his heartbeat fainter now. I pressed my magic into my newfound knowledge, following the unfamiliar patterns and shapes of the ritual with my mind, painting a circle around us in golden light. Magic oozed from me, filling each line as I drew it.

“Alek,” I whispered, pouring my will into the circle. “Be a tiger.”

Then the circle snapped into place and the hand I held became a paw, too big for my hands to encompass. The man struggling to live beside me became a huge white tiger, his body shoving aside the desk with his weight.

His heart steadied. His breathing evened out. He slept.

Levi and Vivian must have heard me shout with joy as I let the circle fade away. I didn’t know what words were coming from my mouth, which languages I spoke to them in. I clung to his paw and rubbed my cheek on his rough fur.

Vivian checked his vitals, drawing blood. She left, but after a few minutes she returned, her face full of awe. When she looked at me, there was a shadow of fear in her eyes. “His body is untainted by poison. He will sleep for a while, I think, while his other self fights the poison, but I think he is strong enough to purge it. The twilight is a powerful place.”

“Twilight?” I said.

“Nothing to do with the book,” Levi said as he knelt beside me, touching Alek’s fur as though to reassure himself that the tiger was real. “It’s what some of us call the place where our non-physical self lives. Ezee calls it the Cave, after Plato’s work.”

His dark eyes met mine, and I was relieved to see no fear in them. Of course, he had known for months what I was. Vivian, not so much. I had a feeling my days of living anonymously as just another low-power witch in a town full of supernaturals were about to be a distant memory after the events of this weekend.

That would be a bridge I’d fireball when I came to it.

“Can we move him?” I asked.

“It’s safe to move him,” Vivian said with a wan smile. “But I am not sure we are physically capable of getting him out of here.”

“I’d like to try,” I said. “I’d rather have him at the Henhouse than here. You, too, Vivian. If Eva figures out he didn’t die in the quarry, she might come here.”

“Eva? The other Justice?” Vivian looked like she might faint. Her face got splotchy and she took a couple of deep breaths.

In my rage and pain I’d forgotten to mention who had shot and poisoned him, and apparently Levi hadn’t mentioned it either. Oops.