Allie Beckstrom 09 - Magic for a Price (31 page)

They snarled, fighting the magic that we directed at them as we rebuilt our spells faster than Leander and Isabelle could tear them apart.

Terric pushed up onto his feet, and Shame held on to the back of his jacket to help him stay standing. Each of them used one hand to pour magic into a barrier to slow the dark magic that was still consuming the city, building by building.

Every time Zay blinked, the world went a little too dark for a little too long. He had lost blood. Too much blood, and I was pretty sure he’d cracked ribs that had just recently healed and maybe done more damage. A lot more damage.

I gave him all the strength I could, so we could stand strong, steady.

But it was all we could do to keep that cage intact, to force magic to hold them as they twisted, pushed, pulled, and blasted at the bars around them.

Our grip on magic was slipping. Our grip on consciousness was slipping.

We couldn’t hold out for much longer. Shame and Terric couldn’t hold out for much longer.

A shadow knifed down out of the sky, something big, coming at us fast. We glanced up.

Stone angled down and landed at the feet of my body, answering the Summon spell I had cast.

Dad lifted my hand toward him, but Stone’s ears flattened against his big head and he growled.

He didn’t like Dad running the show either.

“Stone,” Dad said. With my mouth, with my voice.

Stone backed away from him, snarling.

“It is fine,” he said. “Everything is fine. Allison is safe with Zayvion.” He held out my hand—the unbroken one—again. “Come to me,” he coaxed. “We can help her. Together, we can help her.”

The Overseer yelled and raged. Leander and Isabelle’s voices filled my mind, and the world went dark for a heartbeat. For two.

“Die!” they screamed.

They pulled on our magic. So fast, it slipped my control, slipped Zayvion’s control. They drank down everything we were throwing at them. Drank down everything Shame and Terric hit them with.

Time seemed to slow. I felt the wrenching pain of magic being ripped, physically, out of Zay by Leander and Isabelle. I heard Shame and Terric yell.

And I watched as Dad cast a spell with a single finger, standing still in the maelstrom of power, drawing a simple glyph with his signature. He kissed my right palm and blew across it, sending the spell to softly float toward Stone.

Leander and Isabelle turned magic into a bolt of raw black power and hatred. Light and dark magic snapped, arcing out in a block radius.

They threw that spell. Straight for Dad. For me. My body.

Magic blasted into my chest.

I watched my body buckle, stiffen, and fall.

Lifeless as a rag doll.

There was a hole in my chest where flesh should be, skin should be, bone should be.

I lay there, staring, blank, as blood oozed out of that hole.

My Dad, a ghost, stepped up and out of me. He looked down at my body, maybe with regret. Maybe just with relief to be free of me.

Dead.

I was dead.

N
o,
I thought. The pain was slow to reach me, but it found me. The world spun as that pain pulled on me. I didn’t know how to hold on to living. Didn’t know how not to die.

Don’t leave,
Zayvion cried out, wrapping his need, his love around me, holding me strong to his soul, as if trying to tie me tight against the wind.

I held on to him, too afraid to let go.

Dad, a ghost, turned. Looked at me inside Zayvion. Shook his head. Regret. But not sorrow. More like disappointment.

And then the spell that he’d blown on a kiss to Stone landed right in the center of the gargoyle’s forehead.

“Thank you, Allison,” Dad said. “For your sacrifice.”

The spell sent out soft ribbons of light and darkness to wrap around Stone. Where the spell touched the glyphs carved into Stone, the ribbon sank in and caught up that glyph like a bead on a string. All the glyphs across Stone’s body flickered to life, joined, and created a net.

The net surrounded Dad, lifted him, carried him, his ghost, his soul, and sank him into Stone.

Stone had carried Zayvion’s soul out of death.

That had been my dad’s idea.

Stone had carried both light and dark magic inside him to purify the wells.

That had been my dad’s idea.

Stone had been carved by Cody, a savant, and spells of Passage and Transference had been carved into him. Spells that could carry someone’s soul safely to another place, another state of living.

That had been my dad’s idea too.

Cody had begged Daniel not to do something. I was pretty sure it was this. Here. Now.

Cody had begged Daniel not to possess Stone.

Stone lifted up on his back legs, his wings spread wide, arms out to each side, head tipped up to the sky.

And then the magic Dad had cast in him, the glyphs carved into him, strummed like an orchestra of instruments all playing their part of one chord, building a song, harmonizing light and dark magic into a glorious chorus.

Magic surrounded Stone. And changed him.

At the distant edge of Zay’s awareness, I knew Shame and Terric had thrown up a Shield to protect us from Leander and Isabelle’s attacks.

A blast rocked the air.

Shame and Terric fell, bloody, unconscious, the Shield they had cast broken.

“Die!” Leander and Isabelle’s word carried our end.

Zay yelled.

My hold on him slipped.

I was pulled, dragged away from Zay and toward my dead body.

Then the world didn’t just slow. It stopped.

Zay didn’t move. I didn’t move. Leander and Isabelle didn’t move. Not even the wind or the river beyond the park moved. The only thing that moved was Stone.

Stone glowed with dark and light magic that pulsed through the glyphs carved into him. Those glyphs moved, as if forming the language of a spell I had never read before. As each glyph found a new place on his body, the spell formed and reshaped him, changed him. His body shifted like blocks being restacked.

Until it was not Stone, not a gargoyle at all standing there. Until it was my father standing there. My father, made of stone and magic and death.

He was taller than I remembered, the stone body offering him no color other than the shadows of magic that slipped over his face, his shoulders, his hands.

Jingo Jingo had asked Dad where the simulacrum was. Dad had said there wasn’t one.

He lied. Stone was the simulacrum. A vessel my father had commissioned Cody to carve for his soul years ago. A plan he had in place for his death. For this.

This is what Cody made Stone for. It was why Stone had so many glyphs on him. Why Stone could hold dark and light magic, why Stone was an Animate, alive.

He was made to become a body for my father’s undead soul.

Dad had always told me he wanted two things: for magic to be in the right hands, and immortality.

By the right hands, he meant his own.

And by immortality, he meant this. A body made of rock and powered by magic would never die. Especially since it wasn’t alive to begin with.

Dad took a step toward Leander and Isabelle, who were frozen still. The earth shook.

“You,” Dad said in a deep voice amplified by magic, “are done now. Magic is not yours. Has never been yours to rule. So the Authority decreed in ancient times. So they paid the price with their lives to break magic so
that it would hold you apart and banish you to death. Your refusal of death, your refusal to bow to the sentence given to you for killing so many, will now be your end.

“If death will not stop your hunger to rule, then you will pay the price of bringing magic back together again, just as the ancient Authority members paid the price to break it apart.”

Dad lifted his hands, one to the sky, one to the ground. And called on magic.

Light and dark magic answered his call. For a moment, he stood there, holding the two halves of magic in his hands, light in one, dark in the other.

Then he joined his hands together.

A bolt of magic sliced through the air like a blade, taking off her head.

The Overseer fell, lifeless.

But Leander and Isabelle stood in her place. They weren’t completely solid, just enough to still look human. I could see the color of Leander’s eyes—hazel—and Isabelle’s hair—honey gold. I could see their anger, their fury twisting their features into hatred.

Whatever Dad had cast on the world, this huge stillness, held them frozen. They couldn’t even cry out as he slung a bolt of light magic at them again, this time a hook that dragged them toward him.

“Such foolish, foolish souls,” Dad said. “Did you really think you could cross me and win? Did you really think I would allow you to kill the woman I loved and let you walk free? I am not a man who gives mercy willingly. Not before you tried to destroy me. And certainly not after. There is no price I am not willing to pay to see you destroyed, body and soul.”

He spoke a word and a Proxy spell spun in the air
then burned a brand into both Leander and Isabelle. They opened their mouths to scream, but I could hear no sound.

“Pay for your sins against me. Pay for your sins against mankind.”

Dad clapped his hands together again and Leander and Isabelle writhed in agony. Dark and light magic joined in Dad’s hands. Not clashing, not burning, not exploding.

No one could hold dark magic for long. Guardians of the gate trained long years to be able to use dark and light magic together for just the briefest spells.

But Dad pulled on another magic. The soft pink magic of St. Johns, pure, untouched. It poured up out of the earth, and wrapped around the magic he held in his hands, just like the pure magic from the disks had wrapped around the dark and light magic held in Stone.

With the healing magic of St. Johns, dark and light magic meshed together, magnet to steel.

A bell tone, louder than thunder, deep as the roots of reality, rang out. Leander and Isabelle screamed. Dad’s voice rolled heavy, sharp across my mind, burning with power.

The world seemed to turn inside out as dark and light magic joined.

Dad had told me it would take a Focal, a person who could withstand the punishment, and pay the massive price, to join light and dark magic again.

Looked like a dead man in a stone body made just for this reason was a perfect Focal.

And the spirits of two dead Soul Complements were just what he needed to pay the price.

I’m sure that was in his plans too.

Time began again.

We fell, Zay and I.

I don’t remember hitting the ground. One moment I was falling with Zayvion, the next, Zayvion was pushing up onto his knees. I stood beside him, my dead body on the ground behind me.

“Allie,” Zay panted.

“I’m here,” I said, but he couldn’t hear me.

Oh, this wasn’t going to end well. Not at all the way either of us had hoped for.

I turned and looked at Dad. He was…amazing, I suppose. Filled with magic, both light and dark, a Focal for magic to rejoin again. He used magic as easily as breathing while Leander and Isabelle’s souls writhed in pain, paying the price for that magic.

He cast a spell over St. Johns and the buildings became just buildings again. The sky was blue, the world looking a lot more like it should.

I could sense him closing the wells again and opening the cisterns. I could feel him making sure the attackers in the city had no access to magic, so that the fight was now over. I was a little surprised by all that. I’d never thought putting all magic, both dark and light, in my father’s hands would mean his first thoughts would be toward helping others.

“Hello, Angel,” Dad said beside me.

Not the dad who was casting magic in his immortal simulacrum body.

My dad’s ghost. Younger Dad, whom I’d only seen in death, was standing right there beside me.

“Hey,” I said, realizing he was here to take me into death with him. “What happens now?”

“Now, you hold this, while I go talk to my living self.” He held something out for me.

A pink rose, glowing softly. I knew that rose. It was
the small magic I had always held inside me. The small magic I’d given to Mikhale so that Zayvion’s soul could escape death. So that Zay could live.

“I won’t take it if it means Zay will die.”

“That’s not what it means.” He glanced at Zayvion, who was frozen in place again. Concern darkened Dad’s face.

“Your agreement with Mikhale has been fulfilled. This magic never belonged in death, or to Sedra anyway.”

I didn’t know if I should take it. I had never trusted Dad much, old or young. And the one time I did—this time—well, look at him. He’d gone megalomaniac, taken over all of magic, and killed me and my gargoyle in the process.

Not a great track record for the whole trust thing.

“Here, now,” he said. “I really do need to talk to myself.”

I took the rose. It was soft and warm, and gave off just the faintest perfume.

Dead Dad walked over to living Dad.

“Daniel,” he said.

Living Dad looked down at him and arched his eyebrows. “Ah, you are here. As it should be. Join with me.” He held his hand out.

Dead Dad shook his head. “If I join with you, we will hold all magic.”

“Yes?”

“It is believed that whoever becomes the Focal of magic, to bring it fully together, darkness and light, will change magic in some way. Leander and Isabelle wanted power and destruction. Even when they were alive, that is what they sought. If they were allowed to join magic
and rule over it, it would be a very dark world they created.”

“Yes.”

“We want that too.”

“Not destruction,” Living Dad said. “And ultimately, not a dark world. We would create, build. Of course it would be different. Efficient. Magic would be parceled out, controlled. The world would become a fine-tuned network of magic. A great machine.”

“We would destroy. You know it is true.” He smiled ruefully. “We are an ambitious man. A vengeful man. We do not compromise well.”

“Don’t lecture me on our qualities.”

“Daniel,” Dead Dad said. “We have already made our choice. Years ago. To sacrifice our life for those we love.”