39. Favor
Favor
I’d never felt so powerless in my life. Not even watching my parents die in front of me, or watching Sirena take Bones through that mirror. Not even when my brother got kidnapped out of what was supposed to be the most secure complex in all of Magique.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream.
My body felt disturbingly, horrifyingly weak, like that of a newborn kitten. I could feel it getting weaker every second, every breath I took.
It was like watching oneself age and die in fast-forward.
Every instant inside that magic ripped away years.
My chest felt like an enormous weight lay on top of it, even though I remained kneeling and mostly upright.
My mind fell into darkness. That whole part of me submerged into a fog so dense and deep, I couldn’t feel anything outside of it, couldn’t make sense of its nauseating churn.
I grasped for some part of myself anyway, for some kind of meaning.
I fought to move my mind forward, to make it function in straight lines, but my thoughts only slid further from my grasp the harder I strained for them.
Malefic began chanting louder.
His voice was guttural, deep, hissing, poisonous in turns. He switched between what sounded like Ancient Egyptian, Latin, Sanskrit, Urdu, German, and French.
In the beginning, his followers chanted with him.
Their voices harmonized and resonated with his.
Before he had started, Malefic removed his leather uniform coat and breastplate.
I’d been disturbed by sight of his pale skin, and the contrast of his one pale arm, muscular and alive, against the other, which was metal, jointed, with a greenish cast, and appeared to have been fused to his shoulder and some part of his chest.
That arm, obviously artificial, had changed dramatically from the last time I’d seen it.
The changes both revolted and fascinated me.
I couldn’t deny it was an impressive piece of engineering and magic.
The arm moved with a mechanical grace, yet somehow held magic like flesh.
I remembered that part of him being dead and dark the last time I’d seen it, but now it glowed more than his living arm, and something about how his bone dragon interacted with the swiveling, jointed appendage made me think he’d fashioned it not just to be animated by magic, but also to store and channel it.
It was disturbing. It struck me as somehow obscene.
He held both arms over me now. They glowed brighter in the Aether the longer he chanted, changing colors as he spoke louder.
His words sank into me like iron hooks.
They bound me to him through my blood, through my connection to Bones, even through my La Fey bloodline that had long been devoted to his religion. I felt those horrific cords that tied us together, and it felt like being swallowed whole.
I fought it as long as I could, but my vision eventually began to gray.
Then it began to black out around the edges.
Mercilessly, whatever he did to me, it didn’t knock me out.
It didn’t even blind me, not entirely.
I could still feel everything. I could feel myself being consumed.
At first, the change felt mostly physical, like he was leeching the blood out of my veins, the breath out of my lungs, the muscles from around my bones.
Within minutes, I could scarcely hold up my head.
My neck softened and went slack, my shoulders, arms, hands, jaw, tongue.
I fell backwards, held up only by the cords of magic between myself and the bare-chested figure with his ghost-like arms raised over her, and his long black hair.
I stared up at him, at his glowing, silver eyes.
Those were nothing like Bones. They were deathlike, empty.
Yet I couldn’t break free of his gaze.
My magic gathered hotly and sickeningly in my chest just before he would siphon it out.
The pulling sensation made me more nauseated.
Every part of the process made me want to vomit.
My revulsion curled my lips, brought bile permanently to my throat.
He sucked that pure light out through cords like a parasite.
I watched that heated, fire-like thread leave me and tears ran down my face.
It was all I had left, all that tied me to––
Something changed.
I couldn’t make sense of it, not at first.
Something in the process slowed.
It slowed… slowed… slowed…
I felt it come to a stop.
Then, abruptly, the cords between us snapped.
I collapsed backwards, my arms and hands still bound, barely held up by my knees and shins, which felt somehow glued to the marble floor.
Despite the pain, I felt nothing but relief.
I felt so insanely, incredibly weak, but so, so much better.
It felt like something else held me in place now––something other than the ritual and Malefic, and the cords he’d created out of my blood and magic.
It didn’t feel entirely like me, but it didn’t feel not like me, either.
I didn’t have it in me to try very hard to understand.
I definitely didn’t try to make it into something rational in my head.
I leaned into my relief gratefully instead, and let out rough gasps of air.
My lungs could fill with air now, working my heart and chest. My throat could swallow, and although I was still bound, my body could move.
I could turn my head. I could move my fingers.
My throat hurt, but I swallowed anyway. My vision swam slowly from black to gray…
then lightened until I could remember where I was.
Worm Hall came into focus around me.
My muscles tensed as soon as I remembered where I was. My head rose achingly, my shoulders, spine, and abdomen clenched enough to bring me mostly upright.
It was exhausting, doing even that much. I gasped for breath while I rested, still staring at Malefic where he stood over me, but now I could barely see him.
That was even more of a relief.
Instead of being trapped and caught in that inhuman, cold, hypnotic gaze, I could look at him or look away. I could look past him rather than into that dead, silver-eyed stare. Just having that much agency was such a relief I almost cried.
When I finally made myself really look at him, his skin had gone even paler.
He stared back at me, his silver eyes abnormally wide. He licked his lips with an obscene tongue, face hollow and gaunt. How had I ever thought this man looked like my husband? His whole body looked like bleached skin stretched over bone.
He looked… odd, I realized.
His pupils had blown out, making him look more confused than I’d ever seen him.
His eyes definitely hadn’t looked that way while he’d been chanting the words of his ritual.
Even the black of his pupils looked different than it had in the midst of the spell.
During the spell they’d been deathly still, opaque, light-swallowing, impenetrable.
Now his eyes looked flat, muddier, and significantly less terrifying.
My mind began to come back on as I looked at him.
As it did, something else clicked.
Eye of Ra, the L.S.D.
He’d poured wine into my blood, likely from the same supply of casks Luc must have poisoned with the human drug he’d gotten from Darragh. It had been at least a half-hour since he’d drunk it. The effects must have kicked in.
That had to be it. That’s what Elysia had been sent to warn me about.
They’d dosed the entire party of Dark Cathedrals, even their “One True King” had gotten a stomach full of human narcotic when he decided to drink my blood.
All of the screaming around Worm Hall right now had to be from the alcohol, too.
Malefic turned sharply towards me, almost like he heard my thoughts.
His chalk-white, still nominally handsome face contorted with rage as he stared at me.
He looked even more gaunt now, almost skull-like as he raised his hand, pulling magic through his bone dragon primal, his pupils now blown out so far he looked crazed.
He hissed at me, teeth clenched and lips drawn back, like an animal baring its teeth.
Before I could react, his lips spat out words I recognized as he aimed his magic directly at my face.
“Rakta… rakta agni… rakta laks…yisshyam… agni-lalala…”
He burst out in a laugh, and I think my jaw dropped. My whole body went rigid.
His words only blurred more.
“Rakta… rakky… rakta… agnininini… laksyisshyami… yisshism… yaspika…”…”
He couldn’t seem to force anything coherent through his lips.
“Rasksi…” he slurred, now visibly angry. “Avaksim… angnis… yaskil…”
Green fire sparked at the end of his fingers, but didn’t leave him.
I ducked when sparks came off that same hand at his second try, but it didn’t get close enough to touch me, and I doubted it would be much of a spell, even if it did.
A different, dark blue, smoke-like spell left his other hand, but missed me by several feet.
He staggered closer to me, now so pale, he truly did look like a corpse. He gripped the ritual dagger in his left hand now, and his hand appeared to be bleeding.
Now that he was so close, the dagger definitely worried me more.
I struggled to make my magic function.
I fought harder, trying to get past the effects of whatever Quicksilver and Malefic had done to me to cut me off from my primal. The block definitely felt weaker now, but so did I. I couldn’t get past it.
I couldn’t even crawl away.
I stared down at my body, and willed it to move.
I managed to slide my foot and leg forward a few inches on the black stone, but not enough to drag myself along the floor.
My magic felt stretched out, weak, like it had been shredded from the inside out.
Had he taken all of it? I couldn’t feel myself well enough to know.
I couldn’t think about it too hard or I’d start screaming and never stop.
My mind still wasn’t working right.
My magic was gone.
My eyes stung at the thought, but I blinked it back. I forced myself to focus on the wizard in front of me. I had to move, to get out of here. I fought to breathe through the blue-green smoke that rose from the flaming runes surrounding me on the marble floor.