Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
They sprinted back the way they’d come, trying to avoid the front of the assault, but the chaos was rapidly spreading.
Out, out, out, they needed Mik out. The rest of them falling into the hands of witches would be unfortunate, but unlikely to result in substantial personal harm.
Mik though, what they were was evident to any witch with sense in their head. They were everything the Greenwoods and Wardwells were hunting for.
“Joan,” CZ began, distracted by people stumbling, confused, out of a tent down the aisle. He stopped, looking at her with wide, sad eyes.
“Go!” Joan screamed at him. “Help them!”
He reached out, squeezed her arm, and then he was gone.
It was pure instinct that brought Joan to a full stop, grabbing Grace and Mik so they stopped with her. Down the path, voices rose, and a group of people took shape, barely visible through the tents.
“I’m aiming for no casualties,” Astoria Wardwell instructed. “Tents searched, no more. Whoever fucked up that barrier spell and set the market on fire is going to get their shit absolutely rocked as soon as we finish up here. No more fucking mistakes.”
And then she turned.
And Joan made complete and perfect eye contact with her.
Astoria’s eyes widened slightly, a cracking of her ever-present mask. She was dressed in tight-fitting black clothing with a sword strapped over one shoulder. Surrounded by a haze of magic, she was a vengeful goddess reborn.
Astoria opened her mouth slightly, closed it. She whirled, pointing in the opposite direction to distract her comrades, saving Joan and her friends.
Why?
Grace nearly ripped the sleeve off Joan’s shirt yanking her to the side, down a path, before shoving her into a tent, Mik following a second later.
It was the one they’d just left, blue on the inside. The pocket realm.
“I have a plan,” Joan blurted. “I need—I had to let CZ go help the vampires, but if someone wields me as a hostage, maybe they can get the New York witches to stand down.”
“That,” Grace gasped, “is a terrible plan.”
“Wouldn’t it make the witches angrier?” Mik countered, swaying a little. They sat hard on the bed, magic shifting toward them, and this time it was Grace who channeled, albeit more weakly than Joan.
“It would piss the Greenwoods off to no end,” Grace said angrily.
“Think, Joan. I know you don’t have any self-preservation, but the witches are invading the Night Market on the rumor of its connection to Mik.
What do you think they’d feel justified in doing if a Moon Creature took a Greenwood hostage? Or even if I did within the market?”
“I’m thinking short-term solutions,” Joan shot back, jamming her fingers in her hair. “Do you have a better plan?” Joan surely didn’t, every plan she could conceive of ended with Mik falling into the wrong hands and a swarm of witches ransacking the market.
Grace looked at Joan, her mouth a thin angry line. “No, but I do have a plan. We do this, what I’m doing to Mik, to the whole market.”
“What?” Joan asked, peeking through the flap of the tent, letting in a thin stream of sound. Flames and breaking things. Snarls and howls and yells. Magic, booming.
“First thing they did was take down the wards, because normally witches in the borders of the market are nothing more than humans,” Grace said. “You have proven that you can nullify magic by channeling it all into yourself. I need you to do that on a huge scale.”
Mik spat up some bile on the floor. “Can you? You discovered this ability today.”
“There’s nowhere to put it,” Joan replied. Gods, was a witch’s heart meant to beat this fast? Joan was on the brink of throwing up herself. She leaned against a shelf, trying to get her heart out of her throat.
“I’m cycling it, but cycling that much magic in one place is only going to put it back into the air, and I don’t know if I can suck it back in fast enough to make a difference, like I can in a very small area to help Mik.
It needs a container, a spell or something to hold it long enough for witches to lose the ability to cast and be forced into a retreat. ”
“Then put it in a spell,” Grace said.
“You know I can’t do that,” Joan argued. “You do it!”
“I can’t suck in all the magic myself!” Grace yelled back.
“I fucking hate it here!” Mik shouted. “Why are we screaming at each other!”
Grace couldn’t suck the magic in. Joan couldn’t cast a spell.
Joan flashed, with sudden clarity, back to Molly’s house that morning. Astoria and Wren had made that map together, Astoria pulling in the majority of the magic and Wren shaping it into a spell.
“Why does your face look like that?” Grace asked, luckily at a normal level this time.
“It’s devious looking,” Mik said.
“Grace, if I suck in all the magic and funnel it into you, can you cast a spell that holds it?” Joan asked.
Grace thought for one second, two. “It should be something simple so it’s harder to break, but with unlimited depth so it can store a massive amount of magic.”
“Which is?” Mik asked.
Joan’s hand flew to her neck, clutching at the necklace there. “Mind ward,” she said. “It scales with power, and the object holds magic.” She nearly ripped her finger off tearing at one of her rings, a gold band with a small black pearl set in it. One of Abel’s empty artifacts.
“Put it in this,” Joan said, tossing Grace the ring.
Grace examined it, then stuck out her right hand as if for a handshake. “If this melts us both, I’m going to haunt your ass.”
“Likewise,” Joan said, and she took that hand.
“I’ll tell your story,” Mik said, taking a few steps back from them. “If I survive, I mean.”
“Mik, if you at any point see an opening to run away and get back to the apartment, take it,” Joan ordered.
“And if we really do die,” Grace said, “your best bet will be turning yourself in to the vampires. In exchange for information about the original spellmaker, get them to use you as a bartering chip with the Greenwoods. Negotiate being sealed by going as public as possible. The LaMortes can put you in contact with the magical-world media—there are millions of everyday witches dissatisfied with the magical world’s hierarchy who would protest if the Greenwoods or any other magical group experimented on you.
And…” Her voice faltered; Grace swallowed hard.
“Tell whomever you end up with that the spellmaker they’re after… tell them to look into Fiona Ganon.”
Joan’s fingers loosened in shock, but Grace’s grip was unyielding. “Do it, Joan. Every second we waste, Moon Creatures are being attacked out there.”
“Fiona—”
“Just trust me,” Grace said. “I know maybe I don’t deserve it, but trust me one more time.”
Joan looked to Mik, who seemed as bewildered as Joan. But they schooled their face into something resembling encouragement.
Joan closed her eyes.
She opened herself to the world, called its essence forth with a thunderous summons.
Magic poured into her in a wave, tumbling over itself in glee, and she concentrated on letting it out through her hand, toward Grace. Grace jolted, but that grip was steady between them as Grace channeled the magic, hard. Pulling from Joan just as greedily as Joan was pushing it toward her.
Joan opened her eyes to find Grace whispering over her hand, eyes golden suns, as the pearl began to glow an unearthly black.
“Faster,” Grace said between words, and Joan pulled deeper.
Magic was a storm around them. A wind kicked up in the tent, blowing their hair about.
Power sizzled in little lines of lightning, then froze, fell to the ground, shattered, and rose again.
Water condensed on the cloth of the ceiling, dripping down on them steadily, every law of physics going haywire.
And still, Joan drew the magic in.
A grinding sound started up. Magic seized in glitches, making Joan feel like a video call with a bad connection.
“The tent’s pocket realm is collapsing, that’s good!” Grace said. “We need to connect to the magic around the actual market.”
In stutters and bursts, the pocket realm collapsed like a black hole. For a breathless second, there was no more.
Then the whole world lit up, resplendent.
Grace was speaking faster and faster. The ring was a tiny star in her hand. Fire caught on the bottom edges of the tent, licking upward.
“Mik!” Joan screamed over the increasing wind. “Run!”
“I can’t leave you guys in here—if the tent goes up in flames, you go with it!” Mik screamed back. They lurched, gripping the bed frame.
“It’s magic, not real fire,” Joan called back. “I can nullify it if it gets too close. All this magic is going to tear you apart, poison you. Run now, join the crowd, and get back to the apartment!”
“I can’t—”
“Mik!” Joan roared. “If we were ever, for even half a second, kind of friends, trust me and go now!”
Mik stared at Joan, tears brimming in their eyes, for twenty-three seconds.
Joan counted them, one by one, as the tempo of the magic increased.
Twenty-three seconds Mik Batbayar held out for them, in an avalanche of magic that must have been tearing them apart.
Twenty-three seconds, for people they’d met three days ago.
And then they wiped their tears, staggered against the wind, and ripped aside the tent flap to disappear into the world.
Joan turned back to Grace, who was throwing off sparks of gold. “I’m going to kick it up a notch,” Joan said over the wind, and she wasn’t sure if Grace could fully hear her, but her grip tightened anyways.
Joan shut her eyes again, threw open the doors of her brain.
Fireworks burst across the backs of her eyes, a luminous, never-ending array of glory.
In them she saw the infinite swirl of time and space, bursting, fading, and bursting again.
Skyscrapers rose from nothing to reach for nothing.
New York City lay before her, its evening spread out against the sky, its streets an endless maze of possibility, the Hudson its spine.
Along her back, life blossomed twentyfold, and death brushed slow feathery wings across the world.
Joan was the cycle, and in the cycle, and the cycle’s death as all the magic in the area poured into her.
She became a god, shrouded in an incomprehensible amount of magic.
It grew and crested, every drop burning against her skin, licks of flame wisping across her face. It grew until she felt she could crack the world in two, suck the marrow from its core, and still she could go further. Still, she could reach for more.
Balance, Greenwood, a voice whispered at her, eight million voices condensed into one.
It didn’t even slow her. Nothing could slow her when she was like this. She was made of the essence that ran the world. She could shape it with half a thought; she could break it with half a thought.
Joan brushed past the voice, stretching her seeking fingers beyond the borders of the city, because she could, because no one alive or dead could stop her now. Power, at last, an ambrosia that sloshed against her skin, filled her insides, the finest nectar ever created.
The world isn’t yet yours, it said.
Open your eyes.
Your eyes.
Open.
Eyes.
Look, Joan.
LOOK.
The blackness vanished. Joan saw Grace in front of her, golden tears tracking down her face. She sagged.
Her grip loosened.
Blood dripped between Grace’s teeth, slithered down her chin.
The magic was killing her.
Joan was killing her.
Joan was killing her and it felt good.
Stop, Joan wanted to say. Stop the spell. But her mouth was too big for her face, slow and hard to move.
Let go of me, she wanted to shriek, but Grace’s eyes were rolling back in her head, the whites filling with red.
Don’t leave me, Joan wanted to sob, and she didn’t know if she meant Grace or the magic.
Feeling flooded her hand. This wasn’t her.
This wasn’t Joan. She was not made for violence; she rebelled against its very presence.
Joan made one finger twitch, then another, but only the first separated from Grace’s skin.
The magic churning through them glued their hands together, kept them locked.
I can’t kill her. I can’t let her die. Flames engulfed the entire tent. Joan cried, but the tears fell up instead of down. Physics twisted, a world unraveling in the fired forge of endless pure magic. Her body would shut down soon, completely. The unending magic kept her upright.
She matters to me. I can’t kill her.
I can’t let her die.
I am not a killer.
Another finger moved.
I am not a killer; I’m an artist.
Another finger, harder this time. There was a tiny pop as it dislocated under the torrent of magic. Joan didn’t even feel it. Her pain melted away into a strange relief, its absence made her surge with more power.
I’m an architect.
And another. Flesh peeled away from it in a long strip, crisping and burning in the superheated air around them. The bed disintegrated into ash. The shelves around them atomized as her abilities accelerated.
I’m a sister and a daughter. Even when I’m at my worst, I’ll never be a killer.
The last finger stuck. Grace fell to her knees.
I’ll always be a Greenwood.
It wavered.
But there are so few things I’ve done that cannot be undone.
Please, let this be a thing I can undo.
The last finger shifted and broke, the bone snapping, and their hands fell apart.
Grace dropped to the floor.
Joan followed with her.
In magic’s absence, Joan was nothing. Flames ate the tent, a halo around her vision.
She welcomed the darkness.
She met its lips with a kiss.