Chapter 15 #3
“I…” She frowned, confused. “Did you make it warmer in here?”
“Yep.” I sat down on the hard floor in front of her, wanting to make myself more approachable. “One of the perks to being a trained mage.”
She turned up her nose at me. “A partially trained mage.”
I arched a brow, refusing to let her bait me. “Kid, I don’t think you’re in a position to make cracks like that. You’re in big trouble right now.”
She folded her arms across her chest and glared at me. “What else is new? Nothing I do is ever good enough, not for Ma, and not for Pa either. Why should I care about what other people think?”
I let out a breath—I understood that sentiment very well.
I’d had a similar outlook about my aunt, especially during the last few months I’d lived with her.
But now wasn’t the time to share that with Rusalia.
“It would be one thing if you’d caused an accident or two at home,” I explained as patiently as I could.
“But you’ve hurt a lot of other people, setting their carts and other belongings on fire—those are crimes, Rusalia.
We’re not going to be able to sweep this under the rug. ”
Her chin began to quiver. “Will they send me to jail?” she asked, her cornflower-blue eyes—Comenius’s eyes—wide with terror.
I shrugged, pretending not to feel pity for her.
“Probably not. But someone’s going to have to pay for all those damages, and that someone is going to be your dad.
And I can tell you right now he’s going to have a very hard time coming up with the money for that, after being away from his shop all those weeks to bring you back here.
Also, it’s illegal for the inhabitants of Witches’ End to harbor mage children, so Comenius may be forced to hand you over to the Mages’ Guild.
That, or he’ll have to send you back to Pernia. ”
“No,” Rusalia cried, tears spilling down her cheeks again. She threw herself to the ground, clutching at my ankles. “Please, please don’t send me back there. I have no one there.”
“Then why are you so mean to your father?” Fenris demanded, and I started—he’d changed back into human form. I always envied how he was able shift without the usual fanfare because I never noticed when it happened. “He is your only family, is he not?”
“Y-yes,” Rusalia mumbled into my boots. “It’s just…it’s been so hard to trust him. Ma always told me he was a bad man, and he just left me with her.”
There was so much vitriol in that last statement, such a sense of deep betrayal, that I couldn’t help feeling sympathy for the little girl. Burying a hand in her tangled locks, I gentled my voice. “Why don’t you tell us what happened, Rusalia? From the beginning.”
And so she did. Slowly, painfully, Rusalia told us in a tearful voice about how her mother raised her, neglecting her for days at a time, and then taking her out for ice cream and lavish shopping trips where Rusalia could buy any toy her heart desired.
The inconsistent behavior had confused Rusalia—she’d been punished for imagined slights, then rewarded spontaneously and without rhyme or reason.
Eventually, the poor child had given up on figuring out what her mother wanted and how to predict her moods.
The woman had also drilled into Rusalia’s head that her father, Comenius, was a deadbeat who didn’t care about her.
When Rusalia did something wrong, her mother would rail at her, shouting she was just like her useless, hateful father.
As Rusalia grew older and began acting out more, her mother started spending less time with her, punishing her more frequently.
“I…I think I killed her,” she said in a hollow voice, a faraway look in her eyes.
She was leaning against Fenris now, who had joined us on the floor, and his arm was around her.
“The day she died, she’d locked me up in my room for smashing one of her potions.
She was in her potion workshop in the backyard, and all I could think about was how much I hated her, and then…
and then…” She hiccupped, her eyes filling with tears again. “The workshop caught on fire.”
“And you were in your room?” Fenris asked, not a shred of judgment in his voice. When she only nodded, he said, “It takes very strong magic to start fires from a distance. And strong magic is very hard to control for a beginner.”
“He’s right,” I said, meeting her tearful gaze. “I had a lot of trouble controlling my magic at first, too. Whatever might have happened to your mother that day, it wasn’t your fault. It was an accident.”
“It wasn’t,” Rusalia wailed, throwing her head back and tearing at her hair. “I hated her so much then. I just wanted her to die! And she did! It’s all my fault!”
She collapsed into a puddle, weeping. Fenris reached for her, intending to console her. Just as he touched her shoulder, a powerful vibration, stronger than any of the ones we’d felt previously, rocked the earth beneath us. The basement walls shuddered, and something above us groaned.
“W-what is that?” Rusalia whimpered, lifting her tearstained face from the earth. The sound of something heavy collapsing sent a burst of fear through me.
“We’ve gotta get out of here.” Heart thundering in my chest, I scooped Rusalia into my arms and turned toward the exit. “Fenris, let’s go!”
Another tremor, even stronger than the last, shook the walls and floor as we ran for the stairs.
I nearly tripped as I fought to keep my balance with the child in my arms, and that was when the quake chose to strike with full force.
The three of us went crashing into the back wall as the very ground churned beneath our feet, and the sound of the roof and walls above the earth tumbling down sent a flash of horror through me.
Magorah save us, we were about to be buried alive!
“Shield,” Fenris cried as a huge chunk of the basement roof caved. He threw himself atop Rusalia, who’d fallen to the floor, and we both shouted the spell the Garaian Emperor had used during his trials to stop that wall from falling on him.
A blue shield burst into life overhead. Chunks of concrete bounced off it and rained down around us. Only we hadn’t quite been quick enough because one of those chunks struck me in the left shin. Sharp agony radiated through my leg as the bone fractured, ripping an involuntary scream from me.
Fenris cried out in pain as well, the scent of his blood filling the air. I twisted toward the sound frantically, trying to stamp down my own pain and see what had happened to him and Rusalia.
And that, of course, was when the lights went out.