47. Lily
LILY
“Seb?” She dropped to her knees on the freezing stones. “Seb!”
He didn’t glance at her when she shook his shoulder. In the light from her phone, his pupils were black holes, even when she shone it right in his face. His pulse raced, throbbing beneath her fingers as she worked his hands away from his throat. Even in the cold, his skin was slick with sweat.
Wherever Seb was, he was in another solar system, adrift in a void.
Wherever he was, he was drowning.
The music grew louder, the footsteps echoing more harshly the closer they came. She knew, instinctively, that all of it—whoever was out there, wherever Seb was trapped in his brain—was Hawleyhurst, and vivid rage coursed through her.
He was having a panic attack. She’d never seen one up close, but it was obvious even without a handful of psych classes under her belt.
She glanced past him, back into the room, weighing all of her bad options.
Behind her was danger, approaching fast. Next to her was a trembling block of granite, just waiting for the dynamite that would blast him to smithereens.
She couldn’t get him away without getting him to move. She could fight without him, but the memory of Halloween burst, bilious, in the back of her throat. Did Hawleyhurst have Braithwhite with him? Someone else? She made out at least two sets of footsteps.
More than anything, she couldn’t leave Seb like this for another second, reliving whatever private hell trapped him, over and over.
“Sebastian,” she whispered, wriggling into the tight passageway to face him, her knees pressed into bruising cold stone, the tunnel crushing them together. Her pulse nearly matched his own as she carefully took his wrist in her hand. “Can you hear me?”
She drew in closer and pressed her forehead into his clammy one. “It’s Lily. We’re at the Fieldstone Winery. It’s November. It’s Sunday.” She squeezed her eyes closed, fighting for calm as the footsteps in the hallway became distinct and the music echoed off the stone walls of the room behind them.
“Whatever you’re feeling, it’s already happened. You’re here, with me. You’re safe.” The last statement seemed like a pretty big stretch, but she wasn’t sure what else to say.
“Nod if you can hear me.”
His head jerked once against her hair. Her heart leapt.
“Good. Good. I need you to breathe. Breathing will help.” He stiffened again beneath her hands. “You can breathe—let’s just try one breath. Together. One,” she said, breathing in deeply, slowly, audibly. Her own heart slowed as she heard him gasp in a catchy breath.
“Yes! Great job, Sebastian.” She wanted to cry then, in the darkness, from relief. “Let’s try another.”
They breathed again.
“Good, keep going. You can do this—you can do anything.”
He didn’t respond, but gradually he stilled.
“Take ten deep breaths, and then I’ll be back.”
She fished in his pocket for his knife, then crabbed past him.
“Sebastian, I know you’re here.”
Hawleyhurst.
Lily turned back desperately, feeling Seb stiffen again. She placed her lips against his ear. “Don’t listen. Don’t do anything but breathe. Cover your ears if you need to.” She kissed the side of his sweaty head.
She breathed in through her nose, claiming her Words, running cantrips, summoning everything she knew of combat from so many hours of watching Cantrèa, summoning that Sebastian, trying to tap into whatever it was that made him flow like a slipping current.
He’d told her he didn’t think when he was playing Cantrèa.
Lily was very, very good at not thinking.
Beneath the fear, she found a warm sort of blankness.
It fuzzed out everything superfluous and focused her every sense on the idea of Hawleyhurst somewhere in that room.
She ignored the music, straining for the footfalls he clearly meant it to wash out.
She stepped out of the tunnel and flicked open the knife.
“I saw your car in the lot. Not exactly incognito.” His voice threw itself around the room. “What are you doing, wasting your time with that pariah?”
She saw him then, between the barrels, as she slipped down the row near the entrance, flanked not by Braithwhite but by Gemma, who was, ridiculously, wearing high-heeled boots.
Gemma? Lily blinked, trying to make sense of it.
Of course. Gemma wanted Sebastian, had been publicly snubbed by him.
She and Hawleyhurst made a twisted sort of sense.
But, her subconscious warned her, where’s Braithwhite?
“I’ve come to bring you to your senses, Sebastian. I know she’s got her hooks in you. Maybe she’s even here now.” Even in the gloom, Lily heard his scorn. “If you can hear this, Lily—and I hope you can—you have no idea what’s coming to you.”
Except that Lily did know. Whatever he thought he could do to her, it was only temporary. In a matter of months no one would be able to do anything to her, ever. The thought filled her with a sort of skating freedom. She bumped up against a barrel.
“Ah.” Hawleyhurst sneered his Apollonian smile. “So, you are here, Perkins. Excellent.”
She’d bumped the barrel on purpose. She was sick of his posturing.
Better to get it over with. Using her bracelets, she clapped Fateful Lightning in his direction.
It screamed down the row, bursting with scintillating light above the arched entryway, smelling like spent sulfur.
Gemma shrieked and Hawleyhurst dodged, rolling around the corner of a row.
Lily sprang around the corner, and there he was.
She fired again and it scorched by his cheek, lighting him briefly in arc-white clarity as it hissed past. He threw his favorite Lily-bashing cantrip at her, smashing barrels off the rack next to her.
She leapt forward instinctively, barely missing having her head crushed by oak and iron.
Instead of terrifying her, it kindled something inside her, awakening an unhinged, careening joy that she hadn’t known existed. Her fingers tightened on the knife.
He hurled Birth of Kagutsuchi* at her this time and it exploded next to her, spitting vicious heat and splattering liquid fire.
It splashed over her back like acid rain.
So, this is how it will be. He was all force, no finesse.
If she could keep dodging, she could get close enough to do some damage.
Lily grinned as she ducked another strike, as it broke open a barrel above her head and sent wine cascading behind her, splashing her back.
She iced the ground behind Hawleyhurst, forcing him forward.
She could hit him now; he was close enough that an AEtheric attack couldn’t miss, she could—
“Lily.”
The voice was everywhere. Low, sinuous. It echoed off the walls and rattled her teeth, squeezed around her brain.
As she cut a glance sideways, she froze.
Around her the barrels doubled, tripled.
Her vision reflected and bounced like she was trapped inside a funhouse mirror.
Lights shimmered hazily around everything.
She’d forgotten about Gemma. Forgotten that for all her annoyances, she was a Magician and a very good one at that, particularly when it came to mental magic—illusions, metapsychosis, vicariance.*
“Lily.”
She turned, blinking.
Gemma punched her in the face.
Getting punched in the face was nothing like it looked in movies. She staggered to her knees, automatically clutching at her nose, dropping the knife. Her vision burst red behind her closed eyelids, pain throbbing with the beat of her blood.
“Fuck!” Gemma swore. “That fucking hurt!”
Lily gasped in a breath. Get a grip. She opened her eyes even though everything in her screamed to keep them closed, to curl into a fetal ball with her hands over her face and wait for Seb to deal with it. But Seb wasn’t coming. Lily desperately hoped that he was clawing his way out of his fear.
She rolled, throwing up an inelegant shield as barrels crashed down on top of her, breaking against her protection.
Her vision was still fucked—at least three Hawleyhursts charged down the multiplied row toward her.
She scrabbled for the knife, clutching at several illusory versions before landing on the real thing. Then he fell upon her.
Blindly, she lashed out with the knife and with raw magic.
The blade caught him in the leg as she flinched, her magic striking him in the chest. He flew backward, and Lily didn’t wait.
She sprang down the row, staggering as her vision warped, and threw herself into the passageway.
She didn’t know where Gemma was, and she didn’t care.
Desperately, drawing on her own magic, her Words, she cast the only thing she could think of to keep them from following—Living Earth.
It wasn’t a cantrip, should have taken hours of preparation, but she threw all her power behind it.
She felt it pull out of the air around her, sucking against her skin and her lungs and her veins, and then it exploded from her hands with a concussive crack.
The ground hummed, then shuddered, throwing the scent of petrichor and grave rot into the air, the racks of barrels swaying crazily.
The stone floor bucked, nearly liquid, rolling and unstable.
The barrels began to fall. Gemma’s scream echoed and echoed.
Lily didn’t stop to watch; she plunged down the passage, and then—
Dammit.
“Seb!” She shoved against him in the darkness. “Move!”
Miraculously, he shuddered to life, scurrying down the tunnel. Once they were into the next tower, she took the lead, dragging him by the hand, desperately racing through half-remembered hallways until they burst into the tasting room, and then they were out into the twilight.
Desperately, she pulled Seb’s keys from his coat and flung herself into the front seat, sending up a frantic prayer of thanks to her mother for insisting she learn how to drive on a stick shift, even though it had nearly destroyed their relationship.
She jerked the seat forward, sparing only a single glance for Seb, half-catatonic but safe in the passenger seat.
She thrust the key into the ignition and the car rumbled into life. Nearly sobbing with relief, she throttled the engine and whipped the car in a circle, spitting gravel, then shot down the drive into the gathering dark.
* Kagu-tsuchi is the deity of fire in classical Japanese mythology. His birth was so violent that it burned his mother, Izanami, to death.
* Vicariance: The discipline and practice of experiencing an event remotely through an empathic link with another. From the Latin vicarius, taking the place of another.