Chapter 28
Nic opened her eyes and at first experienced a wave of disappointment.
She felt as she always had, her magic strong and steady, but no different than before.
A ring of faces watched her expectantly.
Gabriel held her hand, smiling broadly. Jadren, Asa, and Jonathan taking notes and conferring quietly as their sharp, wizard-black eyes studied her, their wizard senses resting on her lightly, taking her magical pulse.
Behind them, Seliah, her amber eyes already darkening with the intensity of her inherent magic, beamed.
They all looked too happy for it not to have worked, but…
“I don’t feel any different,” she said.
“You won’t,” Jadren informed her. He pointed his stylus at Seliah. “She didn’t. You’re used to having magic. The only difference now is that a door that was once closed is now open. Do something.”
“Like what?” She should have prepared.
He sighed in exasperation. “Something, anything, you ninny. Just do magic.”
Annoyed, Nic grabbed a passing fire elemental and tossed it down Jadren’s pants. He jumped with a howl, flashing a smile at Seliah when she doused him with magically summoned water.
“Thanks, sweetie.” He turned on Nic, still gaping in shock at herself that it worked and tossed off a salute.
“Welcome to the wizarding world, Lady Phel. I want you to know that it will go down in the historical record what your first act of magic was. The schoolkids are gonna love this story,” he added with a smirk.
Nic was too elated to care. She seized Gabriel’s hand in both of hers, overcome. “It worked,” she told him, as if he didn’t know.
But he grinned back at her and tucked a wayward black curl behind her ear. “I know, Wizard Veronica.”
Nic had to take a moment to master the swell of emotion.
So many of them all at once that she couldn’t put names to them.
All she could think about was that crashing moment when the oracle head had pronounced her a familiar, an incontrovertible sentence that doomed all of her life’s ambitions.
She hadn’t given up. She was too proud and stubborn for that, but…
But those ensuing days of picking up the tiny, shattered pieces of who she’d believed herself to be had been the very worst of her life.
She’d only gone on because she had to, because she’d been forced to accept that nothing could change.
She’d had one choice if she’d wanted to continue to live: accept this as forever.
And now forever had changed.
Gabriel gripped her hands in return, his own expression a similar mix of passionate feeling.
A tear streaked down his cheek, shining silver-white as his hair, and she became aware that she wept in a silent rain.
“I’m a wizard,” she said in wonder, amazed at the power of being able to say those simple words.
“Yes, you are.”
“We’re going to have to build extra time into the schedule,” Jadren said, “if every familiar we convert is going to have to have an existential crisis. Maybe we should have counselors standing by.”
“Shut up, Jadren,” Seliah replied amiably. Asa and Jonathan Refoel said nothing, but Nic was sure she heard a snort of laughter from one of them at least as they busied themselves with resetting the equipment.
“Jadren is right,” Nic declared. “I have a lifetime to absorb this transformation. I’ll get out of the way so you can effect the next miracle. Who’s next—Han or Iliana, I presume?”
“Yes, I’m surprised they’re not here yet,” Gabriel answered with a frown. “I thought they’d come racing as soon as Alise told them.”
Her lips went numb, blood draining to her feet. “They would have. Something happened. Someone has to rouse the provost and alert her. And find Morghana Seraphiel. Wake everyone.”
“I’ll find Morghana,” Seliah said, and dashed out the door before anyone could stop her.
Nic started for the door, Gabriel catching her arm. “You can’t go alone.”
She didn’t shake him off, instead put her hand over his. “I need you to drag Tandiya out of bed. Go be terrifying Lord Phel. They won’t give way for anyone lesser.”
He grimaced, clearly wanting to argue. The others were already packing away equipment. “We’ve got this,” Jadren said. “Better hustle before the enemy hoard descends.”
Gabriel held her gaze a moment longer, then nodded sharply—and flooded her with a torrent of water and moon magic. “But I’m finding you after. Don’t be reckless.”
She gave him a swift kiss and dashed to the door, then hesitated. “We might need a healer.”
“Coming,” Jonathan Refoel said, handing over his documents and hastening to her.
They ran out, Nic giving thanks that she knew approximately where Cillian had been reassigned—and where Alise had gone and clearly never arrived.
Running through the shadowed, empty halls, Nic pulled her thoughts together.
She needed to start thinking like a wizard.
This is your final exam, she told herself. All that studying and planning, it was all theory until now. This is the practicum.
This was saving her baby sister.
From… Nic almost couldn’t understand what she saw as she skidded around the corner to the horrifying scene.
Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t a hallway sprayed with blood and a creature of distorted light and corrupt shadow occupying the center.
It was both purely magic and not of magic at all.
It stank of forced death, terror, and cruel violence.
A demon.
Her father had actually summoned a demon.
Piers Elal stood on the other side of where the demon chewed on something it crouched over on the floor.
The wizard watched with a kind of horrified fascination, looking monstrous himself, bleeding from dozens of wounds.
His familiar, a young woman of House Chur, as Nic recalled, lay crumpled against the wall, like a broken and discarded doll.
Spirits filled the air so densely they nearly crowded out breath.
It took Nic far too long to realize she couldn’t locate Alise because her sister was under the demon. While their father stood and watched.
“Stand back,” she told Jonathan.
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” he nearly squeaked, stepping well back.
Cleansing rage filled her, along with a fierce joy that she at last had the ability to fight back. Elal fire to fire.
It felt as if she had a lifetime of deferred power at her disposal. And she had her husband’s magic, too. She sent a bubble of water to encase her father’s head, the sphere turning a gruesome red with his blood, just enough to make him pass out on the floor to be dealt with later.
Then she turned her attention to the demon, riffling through everything she’d ever studied about demons, djinn, and the summoning—and exorcising—of complex spirits.
They fed off of blood sacrifice and torture.
This one likely grew stronger by the moment, given that their father had willingly sacrificed the child of his body and magic to the thing.
But it didn’t belong in this world and that was something to cling to.
Using the purity of Gabriel’s clear water magic and shining bright moon magic, both given with love, without reservation, Nic wedged a mental lever under the cankerous blight that was the demon’s unnatural existence.
Finding, gathering, and binding spirits was the ancient Elal practice, but the other side of that coin was the banishing.
Nic found the pulsing umbilical cord that tethered the demon to a place beyond, not the spirit realm, but an origin point anathema to both humans and the harmonious entities of the world they occupied.
She couldn’t sever the cord the way Alise would, because that would set the demon loose in their world with no pathway to use to banish it.
Instead, she pulled, dragging the demon backwards with the tether.
The monster didn’t change position physically, but its ethereal self began to elongate.
It fought her, clinging to the anchor of Alise, still obscured by its bulk.
Nic couldn’t think about whether Alise lived or died.
She focused all of her considerable attention, honed when she could practice nothing else of magic, on dragging the demon back, pushing it back through, forcing it to wedge more and more of its bulk through the portal that should never have been opened.
With all the strength, fortitude, and determination she’d forged from disappointment, from love, from carrying and birthing her child, Nic used everything she was and had become, to send the demon back.
It vanished with a boom like thunder, the atmosphere rushing back to fill the unnatural gap in space and time the demon had forced its way into.
Mentally checking that her father remained unconscious, Nic went to Alise, clinging to hope that Alise had not been the final sacrifice to the grand experiment of changing their world.
Bloodied, broken, and—worst of all—nearly drained of all her vital life force, Alise lay like a scrap of wilted lettuce. But she lived.
“Now, Jonathan,” she called, and the healer—still shaking with terror from what he’d witnessed—dashed to them without hesitation. A courage and dedication to his craft she admired.
Leaving him to save Alise, firmly telling herself her sister would live, Nic picked her way across the gory floor to her father’s prostrate form.
She bound him with moonsilver, surprised she still possessed plenty of magic.
But the triad of Gabriel’s and hers shone steady as a pyramid within her.
Methodically, she stripped her father of every spirit he’d bound to himself over a lifetime of wizardry.
It wouldn’t stop him from summoning more, but she could match him for pace there and he was in far worse shape than she was.
In fact, he’d hollowed himself out as a living being. Whatever he’d done to summon the demon, it had fed from him, too. They wouldn’t have to kill him; he was already dying, from the inside out. And he’d done it to himself.
Fitting.
She crouched, aware she echoed the demon’s posture over Alise, and shook her father awake. He opened his one intact black eye, glaring in helpless fury. “You’re dying,” she told him, feeling oddly gentle in this moment. “Now is the time to say anything you have left unsaid.”
He spat at her, weakly, a bloodied bubble that dripped down his distorted cheek. “I have nothing to say to you,” he grated out, barely enough force for the sound to make it to her.
“That’s all right,” she said in an agreeable tone. “I only offered for your sake.” She stood and brushed off the skirts of her Ophiel gown, the magic of it having kept it startlingly fresh.
“Wait.” He coughed, a rattling, watery sound.
Nic turned back.
“H—how?”
She knew what he asked. “The hidden data. Familiars can become wizards. I’m a wizard now, just as you always wanted.
Too late now though.” A pang of grief ran through her at that thought, but she also finally let go of that old dream, of being her father’s heir and working with him.
It never would have been that way, she realized.
Maybe part of her had always known, but now she understood the full truth.
“You didn’t want me to be a wizard, did you?
” she asked, not really expecting an answer.
He glared at her balefully. “No. You were too much. Too…” His voice trailed off as he faded into death. Nic watched his spirit detach from his body and dissolve.
“Famous last words,” she murmured. “Maman, this was for you.”