Chapter 54
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
As I fell through water, watching as the surface drifted farther away and the water got deeper and darker the farther I fell, I remembered that this was what I was afraid of.
Drowning just like that man on the beach.
Slipping under the surface, with no one to see or hear or care. Sliding alone into the darkness.
The water crushed me under its weight. My ribs squeezed, and my head felt woozy and light.
It felt as if there were hundreds of pounds on top of me.
Three hundred pounds. Four hundred. I felt my ribs fracture, the bones jabbing into me, sharp and splintering.
Pain filled my chest, puncturing my organs and my lungs.
Blood filled my mouth. And water, so much water, and I felt myself, falling, falling …
And then with startling clarity, there was Max’s voice.
Kick, Cella. Kick. You can do this.
I heard the thump thump thump of horses and the sound of cicadas chirping, felt the cool kiss of summer rain, smelled grass and the sweet scent of summer blossoms, felt the flutter of moths on my face, and the coarse fibers of the saddle blanket Max kept in the back of his truck.
His hair brushed my cheek; as I looked into his eyes, all I saw was blue, blue, blue.
“Cella, stay here, stay with me,” he said, and his lips were on mine, then off again. Each time, I felt a stab of pain as they left me once more.
His mouth formed quick words. “I bind thee into three objects.” He chanted it over and over again, more forcefully each time.
“I bind thee into three. I bind thee!”
The water was receding all around me in large, sucking swells like someone had pulled the plunger on a drain. All of a sudden, the room was in sight again. A light glowed at the surface. I reached for it, stretching with everything in me.
I opened my eyes.
I was back in the room with Max.
He was straining from the force of doing the spell on his own.
The veins in his neck and arms bulged. The wind bit at my eyes.
When did it get so windy? Hot red clay swept in from under the door, cutting my cheeks, swirling around the room, stinging my skin.
Crosses shook against the walls and fell to the floor.
The wooden piece we’d used to bar the door shook and popped off. In stormed the brothers, led by Basile.
Dani looked at me, and things grew hazy again.
I felt myself flying under the water again, simultaneously yanked deeper under a Magic I could no longer control, while Max worked to pull me back to the surface.
Back to the farm, to his horses, to the dry, grassy space that encompassed him when he cast.
I didn’t know how long I wrestled beneath the waves, simultaneously drowning and sucking in the scent of evening air. Life became a single pinprick of blue, of darkness, of a call to infinite, inexpressible power, a chasm that I was so foolish to think I could hold onto.
And then there was Max, brown and warm and green and coarse and creaking. Callused hands, warm lips, rough stubble on his cheeks grazing my face, but I held onto his voice. It was what I focused on, rather than slipping into this deep, dark trench.
“Cella, come back to me. Come back,” he was saying.
My memories blended with the present until I couldn’t tell where or when or who I was.
We were back in his truck, and he was kissing my lips and my neck and willing me back to him, the call to my dimidium powerful in its own right, but I was so weak. I murmured for more.
His face appeared in front of me, larger than life. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose; his hair was damp against his forehead. His lips pulled away from mine. Then he was yelling, shoving at something behind him as hands pulled him away from me.
4 Hours Until Sunset
I opened my eyes. I was no longer in Maritza’s cottage.
I was in some sort of dark space—a cell maybe?
No. As my eyes adjusted to the low lighting, I realized it wasn’t a cell at all, but a cave.
One like the cave we’d found in the canyon that the brothers had used.
A sliver of light shone on a flat rock in the center, and there, sitting on it, was Luce Montgomery.
“Luce? What are you doing in here? Are you okay?”
Luce took one look at me and threw up. She ducked her head between her knees and moaned.
“No,” she said drily. “I’m dying, and apparently, I get to do it stuck here with you. Wonderful.” She retched again.
“What is this place?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “All I know is Basile knocked me out as soon as I went to talk to him about what I found in the canyon. After that, I remember a few hazy lights, and then … nothing. For a while, I thought I’d died and woken up in Hell.
Actually, now that you’re here, it’s looking like more of a possibility. ”
I looked around. “I don’t know what Basile did to you, but outside of this, you’re not doing so well.”
“Outside of this? What do you mean?”
“Last I saw, you were, um … possessed? By the Magic.”
She retched again. “Oh, that absolute ass.”
And I realized, all at once: Basile’s livestream. The brothers must have done this spell on Luce, let her become a vessel to the One to show they could send someone to the other world.
“Maybe that’s what we’re in,” I said. “Maybe this is the world of Being.”
“Well, great, I’m part of his little experiment. But why would the brothers want to get here? For all Basile’s talked it up, it looks like a prison.”
“I guess no one’s exactly made it back to tell them.” I shivered.
Luce keeled over and vomited black bile. I put my hand on her back and rubbed in small circles the way my mom used to. She whimpered and put her head on my knee.
She sat up at last, wiping bile from her lips, a thin streak of blood smearing across her hand.
“There’s got to be a way out.” I stood up, sticking my hands out in front of me to feel my way toward the entrance. As soon as I reached the opening of the cave, black iron bars appeared across it. I took one of them in hand—
“Ow!” I cried. An angry welt appeared on the inside of my palm.
“Yeah, they burn,” Luce said. I looked toward the opposite end of the cave. “Nothing back there, either,” she said. “It only goes back about six feet past here, then stops.”
I sat down on the ground. “What about—”
“Magic doesn’t work either.”
When I tried to reach for my Magic, there was … nothing. Just static, like there was some block in the way.
“Looks like you’re right about the prison thing,” I admitted.
Luce looked at the bars thoughtfully. “We’re taught that Magic is always around, right? Just waiting to be let in? What if this is the same place Magic is trapped until someone lets it into our world?”
“Then we’re trapped here.”
I lay down on the cool ground and stared out into the darkness. Time seemed to move at some unknown pace here. With no sun and no difference in the lighting of the cave, hours could’ve passed already, or even days.
I’d been so stupid to not tell Max how I felt about him before we went to see Dani. And now it was too late, and I might never see him again.
A story flashed into my mind. Something Jamie had told me.
That when Pythagoras had discovered the Pythagorean theorem, he sacrificed a hundred cattle in his joy.
This was despite the fact that his teachings were explicitly against the sacrifice of animals.
“It’s an allegorical story, of course, like most of his teachings,” Jamie explained, “not meant to be taken literally. It meant that Pythagoras’s love of numbers was so great, he would do such a crazy thing to celebrate the discovery.
Like strip off your clothes and run through the streets. ”
“I see,” I’d said.
“It’s why we took the bull skull as our group’s symbol,” Jamie said.
“A symbol for how easily myth and mistruth spreads in the absence of fact. It’s also why Pythagoras’s teachings weren’t shared widely to begin with, why they weren’t written down.
It’s hard to trust the public to consider nuance.
Pythagoras preached Receive not a swallow in your house.
Meaning don’t accept a loud, bombastic person into the teachings because they won’t be able to keep the knowledge a secret. ”
Cut not fire with a sword … When the wind blows, worship the noise. All these Pythagorean teachings* that had been in Dani’s notebook, in the note from the party. Hints that I would have known if I’d just remembered.
Another memory. Of me, drawing the sign for the One referenced in the Book of Autumn on top of the bull skulls around campus: the ten-dot triangle inside a circle, adopted from the tetractys.
* It was the same symbol the brothers had taken for their Order of Autumn.
I guess I thought if I drew it there, it would be clear to me.
The One has infiltrated the Pythagoreans.
Don’t trust them. But this too turned to a muddy pool in my head.
Because how could I know that the One would take me over so fully, and bury me so deep that I wouldn’t remember any of it afterward?
2 Hours Until Sunset
Luce ran her hand down a slick crevice in the rock. “Look, it’s an oyster mushroom. I didn’t even notice it before.” She smiled. “You know, some people are afraid of fungi because they don’t understand them, but there’s so much good they can do.”
I squinted in the low light. I could barely see my hand in front of me, so I didn’t know how she could see it. I moved closer to her, focusing on movement in the dark. Her finger was stroking the mushroom. The thing seemed to respond in kind, bobbing slightly in contentment.