Chapter 49 Enraged
“Rhen help me,” Sage whispered.
She closed her eyes tight, remembering what the magic looked like, imagining how she’d first seen it, then popped her eyes open. There it was! White smoke-slime stuff occasionally tinged with muddy red slid through the rooms and collected in the corners.
“Yesssss,” Sage breathed, savage excitement flowing through her.
She rushed to the exit door and examined the magic.
It was three inches thick, built up in spongy layers, covering the entire door in a sheet.
Sage tried to gather some. It resisted her.
She ran her hands up and down the length of the door looking for a way in, paying the most attention to the hinges and the lock areas.
Here, the layers were thicker, convoluted and smooth.
Frustrated, Sage backed away and tried to think what to do. She scooted in again and placed her hands flat over the area of the lock.
“Please open up,” she said with a quiet desperation.
Nothing happened.
“Open sesame.”
Nothing.
Sage backed up again and stared at the sheet of door-sized magic, her mind working over the problem. When no ideas came to her, she turned around, still thinking. Down the hallway she went, examining walls, floor, ceiling, and everything in the room, determined to figure something out.
There was little magic in the kitchen, and almost none in the open living area, but near the back of the suite, there was another layer of magic covering the door to the bedroom closest to her.
This layer was thinner than what was at the exit door.
Maybe she had a chance here, and maybe there was something in the room that would help her get out.
She put her hands on the door, then scraped at it like she had done with the magic on the box. It yielded some, inciting her, but then she heard a muffled sound from inside the room. She pressed an ear to the door.
‘Ay…ay….ay’
Exhilaration swept through Sage. Could there possibly be another angel-wolf pendant inside this room?
Would it help her like the last one had?
She examined the magic around the entire door again, looking for weaknesses.
She pried at it but again, she couldn’t make a dent, so she went to the kitchen to look for a tool.
There were no knives in the kitchen, not even butter knives.
She settled for a fork and a spoon, but they were useless against the magic.
Sage pitched them across the room and went back to work with her hands.
After several minutes, she managed to make a tiny slit in the magic with her fingernails. She put her ear to it and listened.
‘Sage. Sage. Sage.’
Hope blossomed inside her.
“I’m here,” she whispered. “I hear you.”
Her name stopped, cut off abruptly, and in its place, a trilling sounded, a long, musical, almost tinkling noise of absolute delight.
Sage didn’t know how she could understand, but she did.
The thing that had been calling her name was delighted that she heard it and was delighted that she had responded.
Sage smiled, her feelings of rage and desperation falling away slightly.
“I’m ah—I’m locked in,” she whispered into the wall.
‘You can escape if you like. Your powers are awakened, and you no longer need be hidden.’
Sage frowned at that, wondering what this… thing really knew about her and her situation.
“There’s magic everywhere. I can see it,” she said softly.
‘Good. You can use it.’
“How?” Sage whispered, ready to try anything.
‘Adil was born with power she uses well. You also possess this power. You only need to learn what is possible.’
Adil. Sage didn’t even have to ask who Adil was. Nana White’s first name was Abigail, but Sage somehow knew it was also Adil.
‘Yes, Adil is her birth name. She may have forgotten, but others have not.’
“What… who are you?” Sage whispered.
‘Who I am will only be understood when you know who you are.’
That wasn’t exactly an answer, but Sage got it. There were more important things to deal with at the moment, like Adil and her magic.
‘Adil’s powers deal directly with power.
She and her brother—and also you—can find, recognize, hold, direct, and control power of any sort.
Her abilities extend to include objects of power, extensions of power, and symbols of powers, like abilities, ideas, memories, money, flags, and even the essentiality of an animal self, as you well know.
There are many types of power, and Adil has identified and collected enough of them over the centuries that she can create the ‘magic’ that you see about you at will.
This is not something that you can do, although you may learn, but even if you never learn, you are as strong as she. You can match Adil in—'
The thing stopped talking, leaving Sage despairing that it had abandoned her, but then it spoke again.
‘Quickly Sage, there is something you must hear, but you have to create a bigger hole first. Use a tool, anything you consider powerful will work, even if it’s only a quarter.’
Sage dug a quarter out of her pocket; certain this thing was actually helping her. She scraped at the magic with the quarter, and it sliced right through it.
“Yes!” Sage scraped and pried and then pulled until she had a substantial break in the magic. She dropped the quarter and scooped, as if digging sand at the beach, making the hole bigger.
She heard talking inside the room! Sage stopped moving, her hands cupped around the clear space she had made to keep the magic from oozing back over it. She pressed her ear to her hands and held her breath.
“What’s he doing here?” an unfamiliar female voice snarled.
“Mind your biz,” another female voice said, and Sage recognized that one. Her ‘loving’ Nana.
“I’ll mind my biz,” the first woman said, her voice coiled like a snake. A moment went by with only silence, then the woman said. “Ohh. Ohh. The bearen called his big dumb brother home early. Isn’t that just perfect for you? He’ll bring his mate, and she’ll bring her shiftsegen.”
Sage held her breath, her hands pressed against the door. She’d never heard the word shiftsegen before, but she knew they were talking about the angel-wolf pendant, had to be! It must be the object of power that came with the new mates from Rhen and there was more than one of them!
“You mean my shiftsegen,” Nana White said.
“Yours how?”
“He promised me my pick of bearen artifacts if I got one of his other sons mated to Promised.”
The other woman laughed merrily at that. “B3 doesn’t have the authority.”
Nana White’s was quiet and mean. “Maybe he does.”
“That would be a nice loophole. Then you could use the thing without it trying to kill you.”
Nana White didn’t answer. Sage strained to hear, pressing her whole body against the door.
After a moment, Nana White said, “What are you doing here, Ethedra. Did you just come to heckle me?”
“I’ve got something for you.”
“About time. How strong is it?”
“This one’s a triple-batch, bitch. Guaranteed to make your bear all bitey.”
“Better be. The wolves are sniffing up my back door right now. He has to claim her this time.”
Sage backed away from the wall, shaking her head, a horrifying realization filling her mind.
“No,” she said to herself. “No. No.”
How witch-bitch had gotten inside the room wasn’t even important. Sage’s mind was stuck on what she’d overheard. Her hand shot to her left shoulder, where she would be bitten if she were ever claimed. A sick and sudden certainty filled her, making her blood boil.
Witch-bitch had to be talking about her, and about Conri.
She’d met him at Mugshots and liked him good enough and they’d gone on a few dates.
He was a bearen, which Sage had thought would make it weird, but he was cool.
Weeks ago, there’d been an incident. She and Conri had woken up in bed together the morning after a date, neither of them remembering how they’d got there or what they’d done.
Sage had been alarmed at first, but Conri had been distraught, embarrassed, sincere, and apologetic.
Eventually, they’d decided that they’d both been roofied on their date the night before—but now Sage knew that witch-bitch had drugged them and was trying to get Conri to claim Sage, even though he and Sage weren’t mates.
In shiften culture, there was no higher ritual than the claiming. Witch-bitch had some fucking nerve to mess with it.
Sage’s anger exploded. She bit back her rage and grabbed a thick strip of magic, pulling at it with all her strength and fury. The entire panel ripped away from the door with a tearing sound. Sage flung it away, yanked the door open, and ran in, care and stealth forgotten.
Nobody was inside the room.
Sage stopped short, panting, staring. There was another room inside this room, one with four brick walls and a flat red roof.
It was smaller than the one in witch-bitch’s cave, but otherwise identical.
Sage went around it and found the door on the far side.
She pulled it open. Inside, there was a single chair, and that was all.
Sage stared at it, head down, fury in her soul, knowing what she had to do.
She sat. Her butt touched leather and the room spun like a carnival ride, then stopped.
From outside the door, witch-bitch spoke, and now her voice was louder.
Liquid rage pooled in Sage’s brain, making her careless.
She jumped out of the chair and yanked the door open, not surprised to see that it opened into the big-ass cave.
Witch-bitch herself was only twenty feet away, staring at a woman who was floating in mid-air over one of the wells.
The woman could have been witch-bitch’s twin, wearing a black hooded cloak over a long green dress.
She saw Sage and instantly disappeared. Witch-bitch turned toward Sage, her expression livid.