Stomach sinking, I realized how smoothly I had been played. Colin had taken me on as his apprentice, neatly isolating me from the rest of the cabal before I could even ask whether this was how things were normally done. Back home, we lived according to a complex and sometimes contradictory web of secrets, keeping them from everyone around us—even, sometimes, from each other. My parents didn’t know about the fire in my fingers. I’d been afraid to tell them, afraid that they would judge, or worse, look at me differently. And now they were never going to look at me again.
When Colin had started keeping secrets, when he had started hiding the other members of the cabal behind carefully contradictory schedules and “need to know,” it had seemed normal enough to me that I hadn’t thought to question it. Secrecy was just normal. It kept us breathing.
“You need to get out of here,” I said tightly. My eyes were on Colin, but my words were for the people who’d come with me to the top of this impossible tower. They didn’t have my training. They didn’t have my weapons. They had their native abilities, and those were good, those were incredibly useful, but they weren’t the same as a knife, or a crowbar, or even a coherent plan.
I was a fool, and my friends were going to pay the cost.
“I still want to take his head off,” said Sam.
“Also, no,” said Cylia. “We don’t run out on our own.”
“That means you,” said Fern.
Megan didn’t say anything, but I heard the hissing of her hair, and knew that she was at my back with one hand on her glasses, ready to stun anyone who drew her attention.
I took a deep breath, looking for strength in the fact that I was not alone. I had never really been alone, because there were always people ready to have my back, if I was only willing to reach out and ask them. “I did not give you my magic when I allowed you to train me,” I said. “I certainly didn’t give you permission to use it against people who’d done nothing wrong. And you.” I turned to Emily, who raised one eyebrow, mouth pursed in an amused moue. “This is beneath you. This isn’t how a routewitch is supposed to behave.”
“You’re not one of us, so who are you to judge?” asked Emily. She spread her hands, indicating first the sumptuous boardroom around us, then her perfectly tailored Egyptian cotton business suit. “You think I should have agreed to live like some sort of trailer trash hobo because the highway speaks to me? Because road magic is somehow more ‘pure’ when the people who practice it have nothing? Please. Times have changed. The world has changed. If routewitches want to find ways to use our natural talents for a profit, we should be allowed to do exactly that. In summation, little girl, screw you.”
She moved her hand like she was throwing a ball. I realized what she was doing too late and flung my own hands up in a blocking motion, fingers spread, palms empty. There was no fire there to stop whatever she was casting. In that moment, it felt like there never had been.
A body slammed into mine from the left, rocking me to the side, and Cylia was there, her fingers moving fast, a complicated motion somewhere between macramé and braiding a friendship bracelet. The motion looked effortless, but the strain on her face gave her away.
“She’s trying to offload her bad luck onto us,” she said, through gritted teeth. “A little help, please?”
“If you think I’m looking at your gorgon, think again,” said Emily. She sounded almost gleeful, like this was the most fun she’d had in years.
“Wasn’t thinking that,” I said, as brightly and blithely as I could. I moved my own hands. There was nothing magical about what followed, only skill and practice and good American steel flying through the air on a straight, true path, heading directly for Emily’s shoulders.
A blast of fire from Colin’s wand caught my knives mid-flight, knocking them off target and sending them clattering harmlessly against the window. The smell of hot metal and hotter glass filled the air.
Sam moved.
He was fast and fluid like the artist that he was, launching himself into the air and impacting with the conference table in almost the same movement. He grabbed a fistful of papers in each hand, flinging them into the air to create confusion. Several members of the cabal shouted. One woman’s eyes went black, and the air around her darkened for a moment before she abandoned the attempt. Turning the lights out wasn’t going to hurt us any, and it might help us. After all, we were the ones with the target-rich environment.
“Witch,” I shouted, putting the name to her powers. I didn’t know how many of the others knew what it meant to be facing a witch, full stop, with no modifiers, although Cylia nodded, still braiding the air as quickly as her fingers would let her. “Sam! Get the wand!”
Colin whipped around, wand raised and already spitting fire. Sam wasn’t there anymore. He had leaped for the ceiling and was hanging from the light fixture, his weight pulling heavy on the bolts. They would only hold for a few seconds. That would have to be enough.
I threw another knife. This one caught Colin in the back of the shoulder. His grip on the wand faltered, if only for a moment. That was all Sam needed. He snatched it from the air with one foot, tossing it up and catching it with his free hand.
“Annie!” he shouted, and flung the wand at me.
I snatched it from the air, too relieved to think about what he’d said. Touching the wood was like touching the fire that had been stolen from me. Colin was shouting something, but I was too focused on the wand to care. It was filled with fire. I wanted that fire. That fire wanted me. We wanted each other, so badly that it ached in the pit of my stomach, in the marrow of my bones.
Quickly, before I could change my mind, I snapped the wand in half. The resulting backlash flung me against the window, through the glass, and out into the seemingly endless night, where I fell.
Well, crap.
Twenty-three
“Mercy is for the winners. When you’re losing, it’s the last thing you can afford.”
–Alice Healy
Falling
THE WORLD STUTTERED AROUND me as the space-warping spells on the interior met the reality of the outside world, finally settling on a compromise: my fall was not from as high as it should have been, given how far we’d climbed, but it was farther than it should have been, given that the window I’d crashed through was no longer there. Only the shards of glass falling in tandem with my body betrayed any sign that it had ever existed in the first place. I was going to hit the pavement in a spray of shards, a modern Tinkerbell who never really learned to fly.
An arm wrapped around my waist as something slammed into me from the side, and Sam and I crashed back into the building together, smashing through the nearest window. His body shielded me from the worst of the impact. When we landed, he turned me, so that I was looking into wide brown eyes set in a worried face.
“Are you all right?” asked Sam. “Did you know that was going to happen?”
“No,” I said, and clung to him. Heat flickered in my fingertips, too weak to be called real fire, reminiscent of the way it had been when the flames first started curling through me, before they had been fanned into a bonfire. My magic was coming back. Not fast enough to save me, but still. At least I was going to die in one piece. “Where’s everyone else?”
“Up,” said Sam. He stood carefully, helping me to my feet at the same time. “Was that ‘no’ to ‘are you all right,’ or to the other thing?”
“The other thing.” I grimaced as I rotated my shoulder, feeling the joint complain. “We need to get back to them.”
“Uh, that’s probably going to be easier said than done, since, you know—”
Whatever he was going to say was lost as something pounded hard against the door to our temporary sanctuary. Sam turned to me, clearly expecting me to know what to do next. It would have been touching, if not for the fact that we were trapped, with no weapons more useful than my knives, no exit, a
nd no way to get back to our friends.
But we had a window. We were three floors up, maybe more, and the edge of the swamp was less than twenty feet away. There were no security cameras in the swamp. Alligators, yes, cameras, no. I pointed.
“Throw me,” I said.
Sam stared. “What?”
“No time to argue!” Whoever had followed us down was still pounding on the door, and they’d be through in a moment. “Throw me!” He’d slung me almost twice that distance when we were in the tent back at his family’s carnival, and he’d had a lot less motivation then. If he threw me hard enough, if I could shape my descent like this was just another trick on the trapeze, if I could hit the water at the right angle to prevent myself from slamming into an alligator, if, if, if . . . if we could manage all those things, we might be able to walk away from this and get back to our people. We might escape.
Sam looked, for an instant, like he was going to argue. Then he nodded and kissed me, before grabbing my waist with both hands. I went as limp as I could, trying to think of this as perfectly normal, the tent lights around us, the net below us, the world aligned to let us dazzle the crowd without hurting ourselves. We were going to be fine. We were going to be fine.
He flung me away from him so hard that I was going to have bruises on my ribs for a week, assuming I lived long enough for them to form. I curled myself into a tight ball, cutting down on wind resistance, feeling the air whisking by around me, as jagged as the broken glass I was leaving behind. When I judged that I’d flown far enough, I stretched out in the classic pose of the flying trapeze, legs pressed together like the shaft of an arrow, arms spread wide, like I thought I could will myself into becoming a bird.
Below me, the parking lot was a black, yawning chasm, ready to swallow me whole, to batter my body and break my bones, one more victim of Lowryland’s stolen luck. Then the landscape changed, sliced in two by the knife’s edge of the chain link fence, and I was flying over the swamp, green and brown and hungry. I was already losing momentum, beginning to drop, a superhero whose comic had been destined for cancellation from the very first panel.
I screwed my eyes tightly shut against the mud and muck, and let the water have me.
* * *
I’ve always hated swimming.
Alex loves it. He enjoys the freedom and weightlessness of the water, and anyway, it’s easier to study frogs and alligators when he’s on their level. Verity doesn’t mind it. She prefers dancing, but swimming has enough in common with dance that she can find enjoyment in the activity. Me?
I knew the water wanted me dead long before I felt fire in my fingers. We were natural enemies, the water and I, and it didn’t matter whether it was in a swimming pool or the Pacific Ocean, it would kill me if I gave it the opportunity. So I endured my swimming lessons exactly as long as my parents forced me to do so, learning enough that I was at a low risk of drowning—as long as I stayed conscious. As long as I wasn’t plummeting blind into a swamp filled with alligators and unknown obstacles. As long as I had some common sense.
It really sucks how often my early training is no match for the world in which I live.
I hit the swamp hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs. I think I blacked out. It was hard to tell, since everything around me was darkness, leaving me functionally blind and unaware of danger. I drifted several feet in a state of shock, barely even able to muster up gratitude for the fact that I had managed to avoid slamming into either the ground or some unseen, even less yielding obstacle.
Something splashed to my left. I was not alone.
My brother Alex is the reptile expert, but that doesn’t mean I’m ignorant. A noise like that in a place like this was likely to mean “alligator,” aka “America’s own prehistoric killing machine.” The alligator is proof that once evolution gets something right, it stops screwing around with the details and lets it go on its merry, murderous way. Even a juvenile could kill me if it caught hold of me here, and I was much more likely to attract the attention of an adult, given my size, given the volume of my splash. I needed to move.
Too bad my body had other ideas. My lungs ached. My stomach did the same. It was like the water had punched me, right after Sam had flung me more than twenty feet across open space.
Sam. The thought was electric, shocking some of the strength back into my useless limbs. There hadn’t been a second splash. He was more than strong enough to jump that distance, unless he’d decided to climb down the side of the building instead. As long as he hadn’t tried to stay and make a stand, he should have been able to get away. Please, he was able to get away.
I rose out of the water with a gasp, trying to minimize my splashing as I stood, spat out the muddy taste of the swamp, and began moving away from the sound that had awakened me. Alligators, snakes, worse things, they were all out here with me. I needed to move. I needed to get away from them. I needed to get to Sam and the others.
My fumbling hands found solid ground. I pulled myself up onto the grassy bank, pulling knives from inside my shirt and getting a good grip on them. They were small—far too small to be effective against a hungry alligator—but they still made me feel better. We all have our security blankets in this world.
Once I was standing, it wasn’t difficult to spot the Lowryland administrative complex. It was the big, bright square blazing with light, a clear contrast to the dark around me. Carefully, all too aware that I’d do myself no favors by putting a foot down wrong, I began making my way toward the light.
I was almost there when a dark shape moved in front of the fence. I stopped, keeping to the shadow.
“Annie?”
“Sam!” Relief chased caution away. I ran across the last stretch of swamp between me and him, hitting the chain link and pressing my hands against it, knives still held against my palms. There was Sam, back in his humanoid form. He smiled wearily at the sight of me.
“You’re like a cockroach,” he said. “I’m dating a cockroach. That’s pretty cool.”
I laughed. The sound had a little too much in common with a sob. “That’s me,” I said. “The unkillable girl.”
“Good. I like your dead aunts, but I don’t wanna date a ghost. I’d wind up feeling like a cradle robber when I kept aging and you didn’t.” Sam looked over his shoulder toward the admin building. “How do we get back up?”
If it hadn’t been for the fence between us, I would have kissed him. “I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll figure it out.”
“Or not.”
The voice belonged to Mary. I turned. There she was, glowing faintly against the dark. She looked sad. That wasn’t unusual. Being dead seems to come with a lot of sorrow. She also looked scared. That was a little stranger.
“Hi, Annie,” she said. She glanced past me. “Hi, Sam.”
“Hi, Miss Mary,” said Sam. “You’re looking, you know. Spectral and sort of creepy tonight.”
“Flatterer.” Mary turned her eyes back to me. “You shouldn’t go back in there.”
“I have to. My friends—”
“Aren’t in there anymore.” She shook her head. “You broke a sorcerer’s wand. Do you know what that does to the wards and enchantments on a place like this? Their ambulomancer shifted them away as soon as they realized what you’d done. The blast killed their witch and her trainee. They set their chained guards on the hunt for you, but those can’t leave the building. Your former employers are out for blood now.”
A strange calm settled over me, spreading out from the pit of my stomach until everything else was washed away. “And they have our friends.”
Mary nodded. “Yes.”
“Fern, Cylia, and Megan. The cabal has them.”
“Yes,” said Mary again. “They’re lost, Annie, you must see that. Your magic has been almost entirely siphoned away, Sam is hurt—”
“Wait.” I turned. “You’re hurt?”
Sam shrugged, looking sheepish. He took his hand away from his side, revealing a torn shirt and skin that was ripped and red with blood. “It’s just a little road rash,” he said. “No big.”
“Very big,” I said firmly. “Any injury is very big as far as I’m concerned. Do you need to go back to the apartment? I won’t be angry if you sit this out.”
“Are you going to sit this out?”
I shook my head. “I can’t.”
“Then neither can I.” Sam shook his head. “Where you go, I go. That’s the rule. The only reason I let you walk away before was because I’d just been shot for the first time. I think I was allowed a little lapse in judgment.”
I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to hug him. The damn fence was still in the way. “I love you,” I informed him, and turned back to Mary. “Sorry, Aunt Mary. No can do on the leaving our friends to the tender mercies of people who think luck theft and magic siphoning is a fun thing to do. If you want to tell me where they are, we can get this over with quick. If not, I’ll figure it out.”
“You know what it would cost for me to give you specific information,” said Mary. There was a challenge in her voice. “You think this is worth that?”
“It would be if I needed it,” I said. “Luckily, I don’t need it, because I know where they are.”
“You do?” asked Mary, with the ghost of a smile.
“You do?” asked Sam, sounding bemused.