Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Kit
The astrolabe.
The one the Consilium had paid millions for, that we’d turned a Vietnamese airstrip into a war zone over, that I’d fought so hard to keep out of Kade’s hands—it was right there. Out in the open. Unguarded. Free for the taking.
A suspicious buzz saturated my skull as my brain interrogated itself with a thousand simultaneous questions: was that really the astrolabe just sitting there? Could it be a fake? What was the array for? What the hell was up with this weird room?
My fingers twitched as I held myself in place, fighting the urge to move. I couldn’t see a single soul, but the spaces beneath the gallery and behind the empty chairs were swathed in deep shadows, the light fixtures around the domed ceiling offering only faint orange luminescence.
I stretched my clairsentience to its maximum range. I could feel Ballester’s sleep-enveloped mind, and somewhere above me in whatever building sat on top of this underground hideaway, I sensed the faint presence of a few non-mythics.
But nothing else. No one else. I was alone in the bowels of a secret Consilium base, and those power-tripping assholes were none the wiser.
The museum guards hadn’t been prepared for me. They hadn’t been armed with anti-Psychica defenses to thwart my abilities, and they wouldn’t have noticed our infiltration in time to do a damn thing about it if that grandiloquent goateed goblin hadn’t hit his silent alarm.
I’d finally caught the Consilium by surprise.
This was my chance—probably my only chance—to rip the astrolabe from their grasp.
With a steadying breath, I sprinted into the room. My feet barely seemed to touch the floor. As I reached the edge of the array, I stretched out a hand, telekinetic fingers grasping my prize.
A flicker of light on my left was my only warning.
I whirled mid-step just in time for a spell to collide with my chest. I careened backward from the force.
Something struck me between my shoulder blades like a sucker punch to the spine. I lurched forward with a garbled cry, but before I could turn, there was another flash of light. A blaze of heat ignited in my left arm.
Magic bombarded me from every direction.
A bone-cracking impact against my ribs. A sharp sting across my cheek. Numbing cold. Bruising blows. Debilitating dizziness. Pain shot through my knees as they hit the floor.
I grasped for my trump card, the warp that had saved me so many times—the Blackout. I slammed it across the span of the room, desperate to hold it, to buy myself a second, half a second, a bare instant to recover—
A bolt of electricity seized every muscle in my body, and I crumpled, my limbs convulsing.
The violent barrage didn’t relent. It came at me from every side, burying me in an incomprehensible and excruciating blur of magic. I couldn’t think, couldn’t react, couldn’t defend myself. I tried to drag my arms over my head, but my limbs were deadened.
Finally, it stopped. The only sound was my own ragged breathing.
Out of the silence, footsteps closed in on me. Whoever it was, I couldn’t sense them.
Through a haze of shock and unnatural fuzziness that had overcome my mind, I threw out a desperate Funhouse halluci-bomb, but it fell apart as soon as I created it.
I forced my arms under me and tried to push myself up. Silvery-blue liquid clung to my hands and dripped off my sleeves—a potion. The room spun. Mere feet from me, the astrolabe shone under the moonlight in the center of the array.
Something hooked my shoulder, and I was tossed onto my back. A thick-soled boot ground down on my sternum, crushing the air out of my lungs.
I stared at the man towering over me, wearing an armored vest and close-fitting black combat gear, his lips peeled back in a sadistic grin.
“Hello, Kit.” Kade’s dark eyes glinted with triumph. “I’ve been expecting you.”
From the deep shadows beneath the gallery level, a group of mythics emerged, some carrying weapons, all geared in the same aggressive black-ops uniform as Kade.
And I couldn’t sense a single one.
I could still feel my magic—that warm spot in my mind—but they were as psychically invisible as the assassin in Oman had been. And like the assassin, they’d known I was coming.
I’d walked into a trap. But how? How had they known I’d be here?
Kade’s gloved fist closed around the front of my jacket, and he dragged me onto the array. My limbs twitched, unable to respond to the commands my brain was sending. What were these goddamn potions they’d hit me with? Everything either hurt or had gone numb. I couldn’t focus.
Kade dropped me back to the floor. A small artifact gleamed in his hand, and he pressed it against my chest. I tried to fling the object away with telekinesis, but my concentration was shot to hell. Kade murmured an incantation, and I couldn’t do shit-all to stop him.
Golden light swarmed my vision, calcifying into a burning force that hauled me up until I was levitating a few inches above the ground.
Hanging in the adamantine column of light, I was locked in a rough X shape, my limbs pulled in opposite directions.
Then the warm center of my magic at the front of my brain disappeared, flicked off like an ordinary light switch.
The artifact Kade had stuck to my chest wasn’t merely a holding spell; it was an abjuration spell muzzling my abilities. All of them.
Kade stood just outside the glow of his spell, his sick smile dripping with cruel satisfaction. His black-clad jackboots loitered around the perimeter of the room, watching me. I was trapped in every way imaginable, and a horrifying helplessness clogged my throat until I could barely breathe.
Soft footfalls from the gallery level penetrated my dread.
A dozen men in suits emerged from the darkness to take their seats in the waiting chairs.
Shadows obscured them, but I recognized some of those conniving plutocrats.
Namely, Commissioner Ruben Sparks, head of Internal Affairs, and Stavros Griva, the Special Investigations Director, a thick-framed man with a crooked nose.
These were the leaders of the Consilium. The snakelike heads of the hydra, here in the flesh, looking down at the small arena where their gladiators were about to do battle—except I’d already lost.
One of the men didn’t join the others on the upper balcony: Peter Druthers, the Director of Obscura Influentia and Kade’s father.
Wearing an immaculate slate-gray suit and a cool expression, he descended the stone steps at the back of the room and entered the arena.
He barely spared me a glance as he joined his son.
“Well done.” Druthers’s tone held no actual praise. “Let us proceed.”
He handed Kade a worn, leather-bound book with handsewn stitching on the spine, coarse yellowed pages, and a strap tying it closed. Even with the potions, pain, and bubbling panic scrambling my wits, I knew what it was.
Bodil and the Sha’ir’s grimoire.
All the discordant puzzle pieces fell into place: Kade’s repeated abduction attempts, his refusal to kill me, the Consilium’s obsession with the astrolabe, the bounty on my head that required my still-breathing body, the array, the holding spell, this whole trap set up exclusively for me and personally attended by both my archnemesis and the mythic world’s most powerful men.
The picture that those pieces formed stole the air from my lungs. They were going to use the astrolabe. Right now. On me.
Kade untied the leather strap around the grimoire and opened it to a marked page. His dead eyes met mine, and he flashed me another smile, as though this was a special moment in our extended game of cat and mouse.
There was only one piece of the puzzle I didn’t have—what the hell did the astrolabe actually do? Staring at it in the center of the array, I hoped beyond hope that Teddy was right and the ancient artifact wasn’t a weapon. But I was having difficulty imagining any alternatives.
One of Kade’s jackboots left his post around the perimeter and stepped into the array.
He positioned himself between the astrolabe and Druthers, who stood on the opposite point of the star to me.
Druthers withdrew a long-hilted dagger from his inside jacket pocket.
The black-clad jackboot unzipped his combat vest and unbuttoned the shirt beneath, exposing his throat and chest to Druthers.
What kind of sacrificial lamb bullshit was happening here?
While the two men remained unmoving, Kade began to read from the grimoire in Latin. The longstanding question of whether he was an overpowered clairsentient pretending to be a sorcerer or an actual di-mythic was finally answered.
I turned my attention inward, grasping for my magic—telekinesis, levitation, pyro magic, aero magic, anything. I tried to reality warp the holding spell artifact stuck to my chest. I tried to wrench my limbs free.
Nothing.
Kade’s chanting rose in volume, then paused. A silver glare ignited over the astrolabe and spread across the array, glowing like the moonlight glimmering through the skylight above. In the gallery, the Consilium leaders watched in silence.
Pacing a slow circle around the array, Kade began another chant.
From beneath me, more silver light radiated.
The magic raced into my body, scorching every bone, muscle, and tissue I possessed.
All the aches, throbs, and sharp pangs from the beating Kade and his jackboots had given me intensified to an unbearable level, submerging me in pain.
Eyes watering, I tried to make sense of the spectacle in front of me.
Kade continued to orbit the glowing array, grimoire in hand, while Druthers and the jackboot stood on the arm of the star opposite my unwilling position.
We formed a bizarre line—me, the astrolabe, the sacrifice, and the …
what? What was Druthers’s role? Why was he standing on the array?
The lines around him hadn’t lit up like the rest.
As Kade passed behind his father, he ceased his slow circumnavigation of the array, tied the grimoire closed, and tucked it into a front pocket of his armored vest. Continuing his chant without the aid of the ancient script, he retrieved a long Bowie knife from a sheath on his belt.
At the same time, Druthers lifted his own blade, aiming it at the jackboot’s willing heart.
Kade stepped forward, grabbed his father by the hair, wrenched his head back, and slit his throat with a clean swipe of the knife—all without missing a single syllable of the long-winded incantation.
Blood spurted from Druthers’s throat, splashing across the array. His son was behind him, leaving me to witness the emotions playing across his face—shock, realization, fury, then finally terror.
Kade pushed his father toward the jackboot, who lowered Druthers onto the array as the dying man’s ragged gurgling ceased. The jackboot exited the array, his role as the decoy sacrificial lamb complete.
Gaze locking on mine, Kade took his father’s place on the point of the star opposite me.
In the gallery, the Consilium leaders had leaped to their feet, but their shouts of disbelief and anger were distant, meaningless.
Radiance flowed out of the array to enshroud Druthers’s body in a coruscating cloak, so bright it was blinding. Then it ruptured into silvery streaks that billowed upward in a tight spiral. Druthers’s body had disappeared, consumed by the magic down to the last drop of spilled blood.
The spinning luminescence plunged into the array, igniting every line with a brilliant silver glow like molten starlight.
Whatever this ritual was supposed to accomplish, Druthers’s death—his body, his blood, his very molecules—was part of it. I had to interrupt Kade before the spell was complete.
I dragged my focus back to the power coursing through my body. If archmythics could draw in external energy, I had a ready source all around me: the array was a rocket ship ready to blow. If I could harness it, I could break free and stop Kade.
But no matter how desperately I twisted my mind or bent my concentration, I couldn’t grasp the array’s magic any more than I’d been able to grasp the power in the crossroads.
Panic ratcheted through me. I couldn’t stop this. I couldn’t do a single fucking thing.
Kade’s lips curved in a sharklike grin of anticipation. “Sub gratia stellarum imbue hanc potestatem intus mei fiatque mea.”
The spell blazed—and all the searing magic in my body exploded with the power of a supernova.
Claws tore through my flesh, my bones snapped apart, my organs burst with unbearable pressure, my lungs filled with acid.
I was screaming, convulsing—but paralyzed in the holding spell, I was ripped atom from atom in silent stillness.
A catatonic ache subsumed me.
The realization that I wasn’t dead dawned slowly. I was even more sluggish to recognize that the brutal agony was fading.
Voices reverberated off the concrete walls in an unintelligible jumble.
My eyes were open, but everything was a blurry mess of shifting silhouettes. Kade’s jackboots were gathered around him. The Consilium leaders had descended from the gallery and were approaching Kade, their movements tense and apprehensive.
Through all the competing voices, one question reached my ears.
“Did it work?”
Everyone went quiet. All attention turned to Kade, including mine.
He stared down at his palm, forehead creasing. He flexed his fingers once … twice …
With a third flex, orange light ignited—a small, flickering orb of flame that danced across his palm.
Kade’s face split into a manic, ecstatic grin. Holding his fireball higher for everyone to see, he met my eyes.
“Yes,” he said, his voice thick with terrifying euphoria. “It worked.”