Magic on the Storm

I didn’t know. My sense of humor, maybe? My tolerance for his being a jerk? Or maybe because my Soul Complement was in a coma and his soul was already in death-that counted. I was too busy coughing and trying to breathe to be philosophical.

He shook his head, dismissing the question as easily as he dismissed me. “To survive you will need to stay in contact with something that is neither fully alive nor completely dead. Something that exists in a between state. A filter between life and death.”

“You’re dead.” I finally managed to exhale. “All dead. Why could I breathe when you touched me?”

“That answer is complicated.” He looked up and down the street, then at the building next to us, as if getting his bearings, and started walking down the street.

I followed him, and Stone somehow sensed the need to stay under my hand. There was no one on the streets with us, no wind, no rain. When I glanced up, it was nothing but terra-cotta sky and hard white light.

“Tell me you’re dead,” I said.

“Very much so. That doesn’t mean I’m not without resources.”

Which meant part of him, some of him somewhere, was alive. Great. I did not trust my dad. I never had. For good reason. And that very calm, trustworthy face he was wearing made me twitchy.

“Where are you alive? Why?” I asked. “Who’s helping you?”

“That is not important.”

“Yes, it is. What is your angle in all this, Dad? I have lost track of whose side you’re on.”

“I am on magic’s side. To see that it falls into the right hands. My motives are not yours to question.”

“I’ll question your motives until the day I die. Again. For reals.”

“This is real,” he said quietly. “Very real. If you are to survive, you need to put your stubbornness aside and listen to me.”

“Oh, I just love that idea.”

“Love it or not, your options are limited. Living flesh does not travel well in the world of death. I believe if you stay in contact with the Animate, it will filter the. . irritants of death long enough for you to accomplish your task.”

He made it sound as if he were teaching me the ABC’s and knew there was no way I’d ever make it to Q.

He stopped and glanced back down the street the way we’d come. “Faster would be better.”

He grabbed my arm and propelled me down an alley. I shook free of him, my other hand still on Stone’s head, and looked over my shoulder.

Watercolor people. And not the nice kind. Unlike the other Veiled I had seen in life, these ghostly people barely resembled people. With their twisted bodies and sagging faces, they resembled movie zombies more than ghosts. They also looked solid.

And hungry.

Stone growled.

The Veiled heard him, turned our way, sniffing, scenting, crooked hands tracing half-formed glyphs, as if they could use magic to find us.

“Veiled?” I asked.

“Quiet,” Dad said.

Stone’s ears flattened. He stopped making noise but his lips were pulled back to expose a row of sharp teeth and fangs.

Dad traced a glyph in the air and magic followed in a solid gold line at his fingertips. I wasn’t using Sight, yet magic was clearly visible. That wasn’t how it worked in life. Magic was too fast to be visible. Here, it was slow and fluid.

He finished the glyph. Camouflage glittered in the air like a filigreed screen. He whispered a word and the glyph stretched and widened, creating a swirling shell around us. I swallowed, but could not taste anything. That was different from in life too. Magic didn’t smell or taste here.

Or maybe I just wasn’t dead enough to sense it.

The Veiled were almost on us.

“This way,” Dad whispered. He rolled his fingers, catching up the lines of the Camouflage glyph and balancing it on his open palm. He pushed his palm outward in a sort of traffic-cop stop motion and the spell moved with us, keeping us hidden.

Impressive.

Dad’s mouth set in a hard line and his eyes narrowed, as if casting magic and maintaining the spell wasn’t easy. Still, he stormed down the alleyway-not once looking back-strong, confident.

And for a second, just a second, I saw my dad as a heroic figure. The epitome of what a magic user should be. The mythic wizard who knew the hidden strengths of magic and his own soul. Even in death, my dad stood tall and kicked ass.

“Walk or be eaten,” he said.

Okay, so much for the hero bit.

I picked up the pace and Stone padded along beside me.

The Veiled stepped into the alley behind us and shuffled over to where we’d been standing. They didn’t follow us. A few dropped to their knees, patting the sidewalk as if they’d just lost something, while others ran their hands along the brick wall, mouths open. They leaned against the building and sucked at the wall as if they were starving for even the slightest drop of magic it might contain.

It creeped me out. I walked faster, holding tight to Stone’s ear.

“I did not want to enter this way,” Dad said, “but bringing you along has changed my approach. Why must you challenge me in every way, Allison?”

“I’d be happy to help,” I said as pleasantly as I could muster, “if you’d tell me where Zayvion is so I can get the hell out of here.”

He stopped at the other end of the alley. More Veiled blocked our passage. These stared at us as if they could see right through the Camouflage my dad still held.

That wasn’t good.

I put my hand on the hilt of Zayvion’s katana, which was sheathed on my back.

“Don’t draw the blade.”

There wasn’t a lot of room in the alley. I was mostly behind him. I didn’t know how he’d seen me reach for the sword.

“I’m not going to wait until they jump us.”

And just like that, the Veiled rushed toward us.

“Do you trust me?” he asked without looking back at me.

“No.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

My dad broke the Camouflage spell-and I mean it shattered and fell like glass exploding.

Then he spun and stuck his hands into my chest.

Into. My. Chest.

It hurt. I inhaled. Exhaled. Yelled. Couldn’t move to draw the sword, draw a spell, draw a breath.

Stone launched at him. Then I couldn’t breathe even more.

Dad was fast. He pulled his hands free, pulling magic-pink and silver and black-out of my chest and pointing at Stone, who halted in his tracks and stepped on my foot, so I had at least some contact. Dad cast a glyph out of the magic-my magic-and threw a metallic, sparking fireball at the Veiled.

The explosion lit the street and carved hard shadows down the alley.

The Veiled screamed, an unholy sound that echoed out and out and seemed to reflect off of the sky as if it were a low ceiling. It was too big a sound, too much sound, in too small a place.

Their scream vibrated somewhere deep inside of me where I couldn’t get away from it, making their pain a part of me, my magic a part of them.

No, no, no.

I reached for Stone, for my dad, for anyone, anything to hold on to to make this stop. Then Dad was standing in front of me, his hand over the old bullet scar just below my collarbone.