Chapter 22
Restlessness pricked at me as I reclined on the cot, staring at the ceiling and listening to the muted come-and-go conversation from the front room. Benedict was right. Unless we shouted, no one was going to hear us.
It had to be after two in the morning and I was surprisingly awake.
Fewer guards would increase our chances this ill-thought-out plan would actually work.
I missed Pluck like I might miss a foot, and I was determined that Benedict and I would get out of here before any new decisions came down from the university board in the morning.
We had to find Marty and prove Pluck’s and my innocence.
Our escape hinged on getting someone to come in here with more than dross dust clinging to the soles of his or her feet, and in the absence of that, maybe get someone to do magic to make some.
Benedict would collect it in a field, get it to me, and from there I could maybe break the lock or something.
Maybe. Too much maybe. Nervous, I shook my hands out.
No pain, no gain, I thought, imagining Pluck’s confusion as he tried to pick the idiom apart.
The reality was, when it came to magic, if it hurt, you were doing it wrong—which was why I knew better than to try to use conjured threads between my hands for anything other than making a light.
“I think we’re down to two guards,” Benedict said from the corner abutting my cell. “That’s probably the best we’re going to get. Petra, I still don’t see why they would come in here, much less do any magic. Pretending to have a stomachache won’t do it.”
“Tell them Thoth is attacking me.” I sat up and moved to stand at the cinder-block wall between us. “I figured out how to make a light using threads of dark matter. It will look convincing.”
“You what?” Benedict barked, and I settled myself beside the bars. “When?”
“Just before you landed in the cell next to me,” I admitted, flushing. “If they bother to look through the window, they will come in.” Yeah, it sounded good, but it was just as likely the guard would stand well clear and hose me down with a fire extinguisher. “Give me a second.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Benedict asked.
“Because making a light is the limit of what I can do,” I admitted. But the truth of it was he would have wanted to see me do it, and I wasn’t keen to experience that bone-chilling cold again.
“This changes everything,” he muttered, but it felt as if he was making more of this than it was.
Exhaling, I resettled myself, sitting cross-legged before the bars, right next to the wall between us.
As before, I drew my hands apart to pull a mass of threads into play.
There was no glow, no tickling of power between my fingers, but I could feel the threads all the same, and I shook my hands to flick off all but one little trill of the universe.
This time, instead of pinching the ends between my thumbs and fingers, I spun my middle fingers around the ends like dental floss—and pulled, smiling when a tiny light blossomed.
Benedict swore softly, and I squinted as the shadows of my prison bars spread over the floor and into the cell across from me.
The cold felt sharper, more painful than before, and I eased the strain between my hands, glad when both the light and cold diminished. I can do this.
“That’s amazing, Petra,” Benedict said, and I clenched my teeth to keep them from chattering. “I could always see the light in you,” he added, clearly impressed. “And now everyone else can, too.”
It was a nice thought, but I was too cold to appreciate it. My hands felt like ice. “You’re up,” I said, and he cleared his throat.
“Hey! Hey!” he shouted, and I leaned my head back against the wall between us and closed my eyes to try to appear incapacitated even as I held that glowing thread between my hands. “Thoth is attacking Petra! Somebody get in here!”
I listened, my chest aching with cold. “They aren’t going for it.”
“Hey!” Benedict stood and rattled the gate. “Thoth is in here! Someone help!”
“Effing two in the morning?” came a muffled complaint, then the scuff of a chair. My pulse leapt, and I doubled the light. The numbing cold spilled to my core. An odd feeling of disconnection threatened, and wispy thoughts flitted at the edges of my mind like sleep.
The door opened, and I shifted my fingers to make the glowing thread wax and wane to get the guard’s attention.
“If this is some sort of—holy shit!” the guard blurted, and I let myself slump, careful to keep the string taut between my fingers and the glow going.
“Aaron! Something is wrong with the weaver. She’s turning blue! ”
“Blue!” Benedict rattled the gate again. “Petra? Petra!”
Cold. I was so cold, and I cracked my eyes, shocked to see that my breath was making a frozen skin of condensation on the bars.
Sweep him for dross, Benny, I thought, my groan real as I looked up at the guard.
“Help me…” I rasped, starting when a wave of warmth rippled over me.
It was Benedict’s field, but it fell back to him empty.
Not a hint of dross decorated the guard’s shoes.
They were being extraordinarily careful.
“Aaron!” the guard shouted through the open door. “Get in here!”
“Seriously?” Aaron said from the front room, and I let my eyes slip shut when I heard the second guard’s chair scrape. “Don’t unlock her cell, West.
“What the hell?” Aaron whispered as he scuffed to a halt beside West, both men well clear of the bars.
He, too, was dross-free. I had to get them to do some magic.
Muscles creaking with cold, I watched through slitted eyes as West fidgeted in indecision.
Desperation closed my throat, and I increased the light, making it pulse with my finger motions.
I shook with cold, and with a sudden fear, I realized it was getting hard to keep my lungs moving.
“She was trying to call her shadow,” Benedict ad-libbed, but a real fear colored his voice. “I think it’s Thoth.” He hesitated. “Do something! That shadow is killing her!”
“I don’t know…” one of them said, and I let my hand fall to the bars.
A sudden surge of energy shocked through me as I touched the metal and the light between my fingers went out.
I hadn’t done it, and I jerked, startled when a frozen rim of skin stuck to the bar when I pulled away.
I’d frozen my knuckles to the metal like a tongue to a flagpole, but the debilitating cold was easing and I could breathe again.
Shaking, I sat slumped where I was. I had done everything I could, and still they hadn’t done any magic. We’d failed.
“She looks okay now,” West said with a dismissive laugh, and then he yelped.
My eyes flashed open at the sudden scuff and thump.
Benedict’s arm was wrapped around Aaron’s neck, muscles tense as he pulled the guard to the bars and the man flailed, trying to get away. He had him.
“Aaron!” West yelled, and then I sat up, elated when the sensation of broken spiderwebs trailed over me. Someone had done magic.
Benedict yelped in pain. His arm vanished back in his cell and Aaron flung himself clear, his hand to his throat and an ugly look in his eye as he shouted at Benedict. Benedict, though, had the guard’s lodestone. Better yet, there was dross on the floor.
“Petra?” Benedict said cautiously, and I coughed.
“Okay,” I said, but I sounded shaky even to me.
My light was long gone, but enough of the debilitating chill remained to make me slow and achy.
I stood, my pulse fast when I felt Benedict’s field settle over the dross from West’s magic, condensing it into a little spot of fiery horror—right within my reach.
Smirking, I reached through the bars, relishing the prickles of heat as I took it in hand. Don’t break yet, my lovely, I mused as the dross tingled against me, the heat of it driving the last of the cold away.
“You can’t use that,” Aaron said, clearly angry. “It’s tuned to me.”
I heard the tinkle of glass. “Now it’s not,” Benedict intoned.
West sneered. “Seriously? The sun is down. You can’t bind it.”
The second guard was smarter, though, and I watched Aaron’s expression blank. “You stupid fuck, West,” he whispered. “You gave her dross!”
Aaron bolted, shoving West aside in his need to escape. Gaping, West did nothing as I smashed the dross against the floor to encourage it to break. Painful flares of heat pulsed against my fingers in warning until finally…it did.
Fire engulfed my hand, burning. I gasped, almost losing the echo of the universe. My hands were glowing with it. Frantic, I pulled the energy into me, into my mind. First cold, now heat, and my mind sizzed with the unruly energy. I had nowhere to put it.
Panicking, I focused on West. Flinging my unburned hand out, I sent a burst of energy from me.
I gasped at the sudden flash of light, brighter than the sun, as my hands and mind hummed with the power of the universe.
The man slammed into the bars of the cell across from me, pushed by whatever I had released.
His head hit with a disturbing thump and he collapsed.
The light vanished and I hunched over my aching hands—staring at them, wondering how they could still be whole and unblemished. What have I done?
“Petra?”
My hands shook; they were red, but they weren’t burning anymore.
I wasn’t cold, either. I had tuned the drift, used the dark matter directly.
But what had I done? The torrent of focused energy had been instinctive, a blast of power that had pushed the university cop down.
He was breathing, though, as he slumped on the floor.
I had to believe he’d be okay. I had to believe that I hadn’t fried his mind or burst his heart. He is okay, isn’t he?
“Petra.” Benedict’s voice was closer and I looked up. He was standing outside my cell.