I didn’t just concentrate with my sight – I tried to call on whatever sense of magic I’d developed over the last several months. I did not, however, call on my fireflies. Do that, and it would probably kill me.
The Lonely King took several steps towards the door, then stopped, arching his head towards me. “There’s nothing you can do, seer,” he pointed out once more. “You cannot open this door without the use of your powers. And you cannot access your power. Now, I do not honestly care if you spend the last hours of your life conscious or unconscious. That is your choice. But know this – now you’re in my clutches, there is nothing that you can do. Nothing that you can do,” he repeated, that same mesmerizing quality shifting through his tone, making it sound soft, smooth, almost as if it were designed to slip right through your ears and seep into your very brain tissue.
I clenched my teeth and fought against the power of his words. “Jim’s right – the coven will come for us. You underestimated them, idiot,” I said, baiting him. Because the longer he stood there, and the longer the door remained open before him, the more I could find out. And knowledge was the only thing between me and death.
The Lonely King chuckled. “As I’ve already told Jim Preston here,” he gestured towards Jim in the cage, “if the coven had possessed the power to go against me, they would have gone against me when I’d started killing off their witches one by one.” He moved his lips slowly around the words one by one, almost as if he were savoring the taste. “But there is nothing they can do, nothing they can do.”
My eyes became heavy. The more he repeated his words, the more I felt an undeniable spell filtering between them.
Just as sleep threatened to reach up and embrace me, I clenched my teeth.
No.
I reminded myself that all magic came at a cost and that this asshole had to be practicing magic on me right now. Not someone else’s magic – his own. Because he was the only person in the room other than Jim and myself.
And magic costs everyone. It was a lesson I could no longer turn from.
Surely, all I had to do was figure out what it cost the Lonely King and push him to use enough that it started hurting him.
“You know, I’ve seen your future,” I suddenly said, lying. I didn’t have to control my expression, didn’t have to try particularly hard to ensure my voice was steady, my breath easy. I’d been lying my whole life, after all.
You know, before this ridiculous magical adventure had begun and I’d been plunged head first into the McLane curse, I’d never thought lying was a bad thing.
Lies – from little white lies to absolute corkers – had their place. Because sometimes – heck, often – the truth hurt more than fiction. Plus, whose truth was right, anyway? Wasn’t it the famous physicist Heisenberg that said reality is just the questions we ask it? The truths we gather in our lives aren’t objective – they depend on the questions we ask. And so too with the fictions we make. All that matters is that we do good in the end. Telling someone they were ugly and hopeless and would never find love may be true by one person’s estimation and completely false by another.
Truth was always what you made it.
But this? This was a lie. And that was the whole point.
I tipped my head back, looking the Lonely King right in his eyes. “I see your future,” I controlled my tone, making it drop down low, making it shake through my throat with an ominous rattle. “You die,” I said simply.
I watched the Lonely King stiffen. Sure, it was obvious he was trying to hide the move from me. Obvious as he shoved his hands into his pockets and tried to keep his shoulders even. It was just as obvious that he couldn’t conceal his true emotional reaction from me.
So I smiled. I made sure it was cold, direct, unaffected. “You die,” I repeated. “Because you aren’t in control. You can’t see the future,” I dipped my head low, looked up at him from underneath my eyelashes, “but I can.”
Slowly, he opened his mouth. It looked as if he were trying to smile, trying to shove my comment off, but it didn’t work. “You’re lying,” he managed.
“How can you be so sure? You can’t see the future. I can,” I added, my voice now shaking with a singsong quality, “and in the future, you die.”
As I lied to the Lonely King, I kept half my attention on his reaction and the rest on the door. I tried to figure out everything I could about it, tried to figure out what kind of device was in the Lonely King’s pocket and how it worked.
And heck, if the least I could do was keep the Lonely King chatting long enough that I managed to scrounge back a little of my strength, maybe I could just make a run for it.
Or not, because that wouldn’t work. No, the only way to defeat the Lonely King would be to bring him down.
“I will not die. You will,” he said, voice literally shaking through the room.
There, I felt it. A charge of magic. He was using it again. And again it had something to do with his voice.
I wanted to frown, but I controlled my reaction. Instead, I kept my gaze leveled at him, my head deliberately tipped low so I was gazing at him from under the furrowed line of my brow. “You used too much magic. Left yourself vulnerable. You’ll die,” I said
