Magic on the Storm

He looked out across the scene. And locked eyes with me. I can’t, he mouthed. I am good at reading lips. His eyes were filled with sorrow, but also with anger. I can’t stop this anymore. You have to do it.

He rocked forward, as if something huge had hit him from behind, but all I could see behind him was a swirl of colors that matched the light from the gate.

He rocked again. And then I saw what bore down upon him. Eyes. Fangs. Claws.

The Hungers.

He was holding them back. Keeping them from entering our world, just as he had kept the gate closed. But now the gate was open, and real, he couldn’t hold on any longer.

We’d fought the Hungers before, when the gate had opened during my test. Even with all the magic users gathered and on the same side, thank you, we’d nearly lost. I didn’t have any hope we would win this time.

All this, all the things I’d seen, had taken up maybe a minute. But it felt like years. I was running, to save Maeve, to try to pull Greyson off her. Shame was still running too.

Hayden got there first. He’d sheathed his sword. Grabbed Greyson by the throat and tore him off Maeve’s still body. Pinning Greyson to the ground, Hayden pounded the hell out of him.

Chase yelled out. And Greyson smiled through bloody lips and broken face. Another gate opened-one of Chase’s gates. Not beside Greyson. Below him. It swallowed Greyson and Hayden. Chase closed it. I did not see where they reappeared. I didn’t have time to look.

Shame, at a dead run, threw everything he had at Jingo Jingo. Jingo, his hand still extended to keep the gate open, staggered.

Shame was good. A master. Even though he had been Jingo Jingo’s student.

Jingo turned, faced Shame. Looked surprised. Maybe he didn’t know that his student had become so skilled. This would be the end of one of them-that, I knew.

Shame still looked like hell. He’d added a cut across his cheek and a bruise over one eye, and his skin was still sunken against bone. He looked like the walking dead. Like at any moment he would fall. But his eyes told me that it was not the strength of his body that was fueling him.

Yes, one of them would fall. But from the fury pouring out of Shame, it wasn’t going to be him.

Shame chanted. He pulled his hands, a blade in each, across his chest, his head tipped down so that only his eyes burned through the ragged, bloodstained curtain of his hair. He looked like a dark angel, head bowed in prayer. And maybe he was. The grass at his feet crackled and seared brown, dead, and began to smoke. He was drawing energy, life energy, out of everything in his range. It was the way of Death magic, a transference of energy.

Jingo Jingo knew it too. He’d taught him.

“Don’t, boy,” he shouted. “You don’t know what’s at stake here. You don’t understand what we could lose.”

“Fuck,” Shame said, “you.”

He pulled his arms open, as if embracing all the life, all the pain, all the death and magic, in the circle.

I made it to Maeve. I had to pull her out of the way before Shame drank her down too.

I touched her face. She was cold. Too cold, even in the falling rain. I couldn’t tell if she was breathing and didn’t have time to wonder whether moving her would kill her. I picked her up, not easy, but I was in shape, and adrenaline gave me strength and desperation. Good enough.

I dragged her away, though there was no safe place, finally stopped near one of the Georgia sisters who was holding the east side of the Illusion barrier. The sister, the youngest, I thought, did not look down at me. Did not break out of her hypnotic trance.

That kind of focus was crazy. They should have had her Ground for the group. It was a good thing Sedra hadn’t asked me to hold the Illusion. I would have dropped that shit long ago.

I knelt and placed my hand on Maeve’s chest. Flashbacks rocked through me. Of Zayvion lying still, of a fight I could not win raging around me, of watching him cross into death. I tried to push it away, tried not to panic. Maeve’s heart beat, strong and even. She was breathing.

I didn’t know if I could heal her. With the wild magic pouring through the air, I wasn’t sure if I should even try. I might kill her.

I glanced back at Shame.

Things were not going well. Jingo Jingo smiled, a flash of white across his dark face, and I added another image to my nightmare list. He shook his head slowly, pitying Shame.

Shame’s hands shook as he cast the next spell. A spell Jingo Jingo batted aside and countered with something that sent Shame to his knees.

Where was Terric? Where was the cavalry? There didn’t seem to be any end to the storm, to the magic, to the fallen.

I didn’t know what to do.

Listen to me, Allison, Dad said in my head. This battle is not the war. Those who fall will be remembered. But there will be more, many deaths, hundreds. I saw a flash of Davy’s face, of Bea, of Violet, of Stotts, of Zayvion, then a blur of people whom my father knew, some of his ex- wives and business partners, and for one brief, sweet moment an image of my own mother’s laughing face; then the images were gone. Thousands could die if you do not listen to me.

I’m listening.

Leave Maeve. She is alive. Leave the others. You must release the Hand, Cody, back into this world. He was never meant to hold the gates between life and death closed.

The Authority will kill him. Destroy his soul if they find out, maybe even kill the living Cody too, I said.

No. There is one who will keep him hidden.

Who?

My dad pointed in my head-a strange feeling that made me want to scratch the roof of my mouth. I looked up to the right.

Mama stood on the other side of the wall of magic, all five-foot-nothing of her. Her arms were crossed over her chest and she wore a secondhand raincoat that was two sizes too big, the green hood tightened around her face like a corn husk.

“Mama?”

She couldn’t hear me. She was outside the Illusion. Wait. What was she doing there? From her perspective, she was standing in the middle of the field at night in a downpour. Why would she do that?

She owes me a favor, my dad said.

Okay, that was fucking creepy. I didn’t know how my dad had gotten her to show up. Didn’t know if he’d left something about it in his will, or if he was somehow talking to people when I didn’t know it. Like at night when I was sleeping or something. I tried to think if I had done any sleepwalking and came up with nothing.

You are not the only vessel I fill, he said. You are not the only one who can hear me.

Holy shit. Could he get any more creepy?

Who? I asked. Greyson? Oh, I hoped I was wrong.

It has not been easy, he said. The beast fights me, but I found a way. He sounded proud about that.

It made me want to barf.

Dad, or Greyson, or some combination, had somehow talked to Mama. Which meant she knew my undead dad was undead. And she’d agreed to do him a favor.

I didn’t know if I should break through the shield and tell her to go away somewhere safe fast, or if getting my body, and my possessed brain, closer to her would let Dad jump the ship. He was stronger here, with the wild magic and the disks. Stronger ever since Greyson had attacked Zayvion.

Was he a part of Chase and Greyson’s betrayal?

What do you want? I asked him. Cold sweat washed over me, and I shivered in the rain, even though it was tropical hot inside the shield. Fear, of him manipulating me all this time, of the frighteningly real possibility that he was the one behind the attack on Zayvion, made me want to run far and fast.

But how could I escape that which was inside me?