Chapter 34 #2
Heloise might be banished, Pan Novak lost to the void and Malek locked down in Jasper’s secret vault – Thea frowned, making a mental note to inquire exactly what Jasper’s intentions were there – but the Magic Quarter’s wards were still broken.
Leaving the magical folk vulnerable to whoever decided that someone a little different from themselves made an excellent scapegoat.
Or to whoever looked at their power with jealous eyes.
And she would not let anyone else be hurt or taken from them the way Violet had been.
Jasper had not been able to resurrect the wards because he had not been the fate-weaver who’d forged them, five hundred years ago.
It had been Thea.
On a winter’s night in the late 1200s, two things had occurred.
The first: Thea and Jasper had arrived in Prague and immediately fallen into an exhausted sleep in their newly purchased apothecary shop.
Secondly, a young witch had banged on their door, accidentally turning it into a small bear, which had bumbled around the apothecary, knocking things over until Thea woke.
At which point, the witch had begged Thea to help.
Her two lovers were duelling in the middle of the Magic Quarter and innocent magical folk were getting entangled in the violence.
Jasper had removed the lovers’ memory of the witch, much to her dismay, but Thea had then acted in precaution.
It wasn’t safe to be a witch, and the witches that lived in this Quarter peddled their wares only behind closed doors; it masqueraded as a simple shopping street and nothing more.
The incident reminded her that it wasn’t enough to relocate and hide from her sister.
Thea needed to make sure that Heloise could never take a step inside, along with anyone who wished to persecute magical beings.
So Thea had warded the Quarter. Ensuring that nobody could enter unless they bore no ill will towards its inhabitants.
Magic had thrived in response. No wonder that seven years ago, Jasper had decided this would make the ideal hiding spot for Thea herself.
How ironic that it was the misuse of her own power that had brought the wards tumbling down.
She stepped forward. Her power was already making itself known again, unfolding like a sleeping giant, roused at last. And she was ready to roar.
Thea threw her hands up and wove fate in a lacework of intricate patterns, the skeins glimmering like pixie dust, like distant constellations, as she channelled all her anger, grief and sorrow into forging new wards.
She embroidered hundreds of colours of threads into one protective bubble, stronger than before, around the entire Magic Quarter. With room to grow, if they so wished.
‘They’re beautiful,’ Jasper admired, his fingertips skimming Thea’s shoulder as he made to touch her before thinking better of it, curling his fingers away.
They had not yet had time to talk, to address everything that ran between them, as deep as that infernal void, smoking and rumbling in the centre of the Quarter, but Thea ached for him.
She always had: even when he had been lost to her, when she’d been determined to loathe him, something within her had loved him fiercer than ever.
Had been desperate for him to kiss her just one more time.
Her heart, slumbering within her chest, had always beat for him alone.
She turned her attention to the Magic Quarter.
To the icy, cobblestoned main street, framed with weathered oaks and those glittery stars that hung crooked after tonight’s battle.
To the void cutting straight through the heart of it.
Digging back into the threads she had not yet released, Thea began stitching the void together, sealing the wound.
‘Thea,’ Jasper’s voice came sharper than before. ‘You’re overdoing it now.’
Her energy too focused to speak, to reassure him, she forged on. Paying with days of her own life, with mundane memories of books she’d read, with nightmares that had plagued her every day for a year. With beats of her heart. She had broken the Magic Quarter; she had to fix it.
A wetness trickled from her nostril, tickling her upper lip. It smelt like blood.
‘Thea!’ Jasper cried out in alarm, attempting to stop her, but she clung harder to those threads, knitting the Quarter back together again, sending that unseeing chasm back into the nothingness it had come from.
Her friends’ voices began to clamour, but she saw them all as if from a great distance.
Like she was perched on top of some mountain, and they were all tiny figures waving from the ground.
She smiled to herself. How funny. The words grew into indecipherable noise, the nose-trickle into a flood, and everything turned hazy.
The last bite of the void, the last, lonely wisp of smoke, drew together and closed.
The void was gone.
Panting for breath, Thea wiped her bloody nose with the back of her sleeve as she tipped her head back. ‘So many stars,’ she said, wondering at the pinpricks of light sequinned across the dome of the world.
Zofka’s voice came from one side. ‘It’s snowing – what are you on about?’
That was when Thea realised that when she moved her head, the stars moved too. ‘Oh, are they not real?’ she said stupidly.
‘That’s it, I’m taking her home.’ Jasper’s voice came from the other side, dark and gravelly and delicious.
She wanted to lick it. She was just about to tell him so when the world lurched beneath her as he swept her up into his arms. And then everything faded, faded, faded, as she fell into her own starry void.