Illicit Magic (31 page)

I thrust my hand further forward and yelled. The magic streamed from me into the open and after a moment of horrified silence, the screaming started.

It could have been seconds or eternity for all I could tell of the time passing. I felt the last of the magic fade around me and recede from my fingers. I blinked and when I refocused, Eleanor was kneeling, her head thrown back and her face ashen and lifeless. She began to slide down until she crumpled on the floor, with her head coming to rest at Robert’s feet. Astra hadn’t moved from where she landed, her legs splayed under her. Her mask was slipping and she looked more perplexed than frightened as if she didn’t quite know how she had come to be here. Slowly, she started to move her lips. It took me a moment to realise she wasn’t reciting a spell but instead, singing a nursery rhyme. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star...” she whispered in her soprano tone.

I barely registered the flash of blue as Étoile darted across the room from her hiding place and threw her arms around her sister, crushing her arms at her sides. It was more like a straightjacket than an embrace. She nodded at me and they vanished.

“Stella. Stella,” Kitty moaned. She had fallen from the invisible grasp of Eleanor’s incantation, now that the magic had died with its issuer, and was slumped against the armrest of the sofa. Her skin had taken on a puce green hue and her whole body was convulsing with shock. Marc rose from his hiding place, visibly shaken and scrambling towards her. I wondered if he could feel the magic simmering around him
. No, not around him,
I corrected myself,
coming from him.

He wouldn’t look at me as he dashed past and when I finally turned my eyes from the devastation and rested them on my outstretched hand I could see why.

There sat Eleanor’s heart, the red pulpy mass of muscle in my palm, the arterial tendrils draping over as blood dripped to the floor in a staccato rhythm.

It beat for a few moments more, then, very decisively, gave one last shudder and stopped.

Finally, Eleanor’s sadistic, vindictive heart was just as dead as the rest of her.

THIRTEEN

I let Eleanor’s lifeless heart slip from my hand and fall to the floor with a dull thump.

With bile rising in my throat, I forced myself to look at my outstretched hands. They were stained with her blood. My stomach turned over and I hastily wiped my hands on my jeans as I stepped away from the organ. I reached for Kitty just as Marc vaulted over the sofa. He caught her before she collapsed.

“She needs help,” he said, his face was agonised and at last, I understood something else; how much he truly loved Kitty. The pain he must have suffered was terrible. He saw his father die and then the one person he adored being tortured by his mother. His world had collapsed in less than an hour, even if the events that brought us here had been put in motion almost twenty years ago.

Marc eased Kitty into his arms and lowered her to the floor. His hands groped over her sweater and found the mess of her shoulder and arm through the thin jersey, before running down to her leg. Her face was beaded with sweat and pain, her skin ghostly pale. “I think her collarbone and shoulder are broken, her leg too.”

I nodded, mute and horrified. “Where did Étoile go?” I breathed finally as I stepped further away, stumbling and almost falling over a broken lampshade. They didn’t need me anymore and now that I knew Kitty was safe, I had a more pressing urge. I edged through the debris to Evan and sank to my knees beside him.

“She said she’d take Astra somewhere safe. Somewhere where she couldn’t hurt anyone else again, or herself.” Marc was cradling Kitty in his arms, her face lolling against his shoulder. Any other time they would have looked serenely content but not now, with their faces torn and scorched. I felt fleetingly glad that I was not envious of the comfort they found in each other’s arms. It seemed somehow fitting that they might gain something when so much had been lost.

Evan still hadn’t moved. I brushed hair away from my face where it had broken free of its ponytail and shrugged off my sweater so I could press it against him to stem the bleeding from his head wound. I laid my ear on his chest and his heart seemed faint and uncertain as I willed myself not to cry. Of all the people I had come to love and like over these past few weeks, he was the one I couldn’t bear to lose and now, he was slipping away at my fingertips. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t healing. A salty tear coursed over my smudged face and dripped on him. I felt a little burst of energy echo from me. It was like wearing nylon and getting an electric shock that tickles at the skin, creating sparks.

My back was against the door into the hallway and I could hear other people stumbling through. Whatever magic Eleanor had spun to set up barricades to enclose us in the house had fallen when she did and I breathed a sigh of relief. The air was whispering to me. Help was coming.

I compressed my bare hands harder against Evan’s wound, my fear of losing him turning to desperation and felt the current again, but this wasn’t the white hot anger I felt when facing Eleanor. I reached inside myself for the last ebb of energy and poured myself into him, not understanding what I was doing but knowing that if I didn’t try to fix the internal damage, in some small way, Evan would die with me by his side, never knowing that he saved my life and we won the battle.

He told me I could take power from him and now I was giving it back. Light flickered from me and seeped around my frame and his. It seemed to stream from me to him and, for a few fleeting moments, I felt we were one and the same. I cried with the pain of the work I didn’t understand and the pain losing him would cause me. When I could not send any more of my energy to him, I crouched over him and rested my head on his chest, my silent sobs shaking me. I could feel him; not just his skin or his fading warmth but the magic welling in him. I could see it. It was like a light cord had been yanked thrusting me into the sun after a lifetime of darkness. The magic trickling through him was white hot but it was fading too. My heart thumped. He was so weak.

It was Étoile who lifted me off him, then pulled me to her and let me finish weeping dirty tears on her favourite jacket. I didn’t even realise she had returned and I briefly wondered where Astra was.

“He’s alive,” said Étoile, pushing me away gently so she could rest her long fingers against the pulse on Evan’s neck. A haze of pink seemed to trip languidly over her. “But we need to move him now. Eleanor’s magic has interfered with ours and he can’t heal here.”

“Stella, darling, we’re going to get Evan some help.” Seren delicately pried my fingers from where they were coiled around his shirt’s placket.

“I’ll come too.”

Seren shook her head. “We aren’t strong enough. It will take both Étoile and I to move him and we can’t manage another. We’ll come back for you, I promise.”

Before I could say anything, she and Seren were holding Evan with one hand while clasping each other’s hand. They locked eyes and vanished, leaving the air charged with magic for a few plaintive moments. I could see, feel and smell magic everywhere around me. I felt like I was drowning in it.

Exhausted, I stayed on my knees where Evan had fallen, the debris forming a makeshift marker around the place where he lay. Choking back the last of my tears, I wiped the few escapees from my smudged face with my sleeve. I tried to feel relief that Evan would soon get help, but all I could feel was a desperate sadness. My throat felt raw from the sobbing as well as the acrid taste of burning and Kitty’s mist. My body was shattered. I knew I couldn’t do this anymore. I never expected to have to fight for my life. I never expected that I would have to kill.
In self defence,
a weary part of my mind reminded me.
I never wanted to kill. Or be a killer. It was self defence.

I fully expected to die in this room, I suddenly realised and the panic started to rise in me.

Kitty groaned behind me and the noise brought me rushing back to the present. When I turned to them, I saw a faint sheen surrounding both her and Marc. Marc was brushing his fingertips at the colour around his coat in wonder.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“Your magic,” I said simply.

A thought had been niggling at me for a while, never quite becoming a fully formed idea but now I knew what had held Marc back. Eleanor had spellbound her own child so that his magic could never come to fruition. It was illegal among witches, so her reasons for doing it to her own child were beyond me. I could never be sure, but I suspected jealousy and bitterness had a lot to do with it. She resented Robert’s lack of intuitive power, considering him weaker than she, and I wondered if she might’ve been frightened of Marc’s potential, just as she had been frightened of mine.

Instead of nurturing her son, she caged him in a life which had no value in her world. She continued to resent him, and taunt him, because she planned to leave him behind. Perhaps there was no rhyme or reason to it. Perhaps it was just another act of her cruelty.

“It has a colour?”

“I think because it’s suddenly come back after so long. It’s more intense.” It was a guess but it sounded right, though I faltered when I thought about it. I had never seen a colour surround anyone else until moments ago; but Evan had seen mine the first time we met. I wondered if everyone with magic could see auras like Marc’s pulsing, shimmering emerald – so much more vibrant than his mother’s pallid hue – and I wondered what he would be able to do now. I hoped the return of his magic made him happy and gave him a place in the world that both accepted and excluded him. I hoped he wouldn’t be too hard on Étoile for teasing him all this time.

“You need to get Kitty out of here.”

Kitty was lying unconscious in his arms but every so often she would let out a low groan. I suspected her physical recuperation would be lengthy once the bones were realigned. I hoped she would recover mentally too. Apparently, I was hoping for a lot at that moment.
Maybe if I spread the hope around like a splatter gun something would stick.

Marc nodded. “Where should I take her?”

“You know better than I. There must be someone you can call?”

David was scrambling towards us. His glasses had been knocked from his face and his hair stood up in tufts. He looked downright shell-shocked.

“We need to find Christy and Clara. They must be terrified,” he said, his voice unsteady. He looked around the room and groaned. I followed his gaze to Jared’s body. He wasn’t moving and I could see the whites of his eyes. We scuttled towards him.

“He had such promise,” David muttered, staring down at him. “With time, he would have been really good. I shouldn’t have unbound him, but I couldn’t leave him unprotected. The idiot. The brave idiot.”

I took David’s hand in mine and he patted my hand with his free one. We looked at Jared for a moment, then David leaned forward very slowly and used his fingertips to draw Jared’s eyelids down.

“He didn’t deserve this,” I said and David inclined his head in the briefest of nods.

Behind us, I heard Marc dialling on his phone before speaking urgently into it. After a few moments, someone else teleported into the room: a young woman in jeans and a cropped jacket. She knelt beside Kitty and felt for her pulse, timing it against her watch.

“We got your call just as Étoile and Seren arrived,” she explained hurriedly as if Marc was about to admonish her for being tardy. She sniffed the air and grimaced. “Is anyone else injured?”

Marc shook his head. “No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Let’s go.” The woman put her hands on Kitty and Marc. They were gone before I could ask after Evan, or where they were going, or even who she was.

“Someone will be here soon,” said David, who lingered in the doorway. “If they weren’t alerted at the hospital, someone else will sound the alarm. No surge of magic like this goes unnoticed.”

“How would they notice?”

“They just do. The council notices everything.”

“They didn’t notice Eleanor,” I said, still unable to look at her. I had a right to be sceptical. The head of their organisation was a maniacal murderer who escaped their notice for years.

It was David’s turn to be cynical. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.” He was stroking his scar again, in that absent-minded way of his.

I looked at him with curiosity.
Would they really have let Eleanor get away with murder?
I wasn’t sure of anything, except that I didn’t trust the council as far as I could throw them. The corpses surrounding me – those of Robert, Eleanor, Jared, and what was left of Meg – were testimony to their neglect and ignorance without even counting the injured. The council were at best indifferent, at worst, incompetent, in my opinion.

David returned my gaze with a cool look of his own and I wondered if I should reassess the geeky teacher. Perhaps he knew more than he was letting on, but my chance to ask him was foiled as something heaved against the front door. It splintered and twisted off its hinges. I braced myself for attack as a small group of men charged in, dressed to the nines in SWAT gear with the most enormous weapons. I would have reacted on instinct if David hadn’t immediately lurched between them and me as he greeted them, running a shaky hand through his dusty hair.

“We’re here,” said one man, somewhat obviously, as he stepped forward. He shook David’s hand as if they were at a business meeting rather than a crime scene. “Is the problem contained?”

“The problem is dead,” I muttered from behind David. I could feel the shadows of Evan’s power behind me; it seemed to hang in the space. I didn’t want to look at the imprint he left behind in the debris, lest I unleash the uncried tears bubbling inside me.

The man who appeared to be the leader looked past David to me and then around the scene. He surveyed the damaged room and the results of Kitty’s mist and the conflicting incantations from Eleanor. I realised that Robert never had a chance to spin a spell of his own before he met his fate. Residual magic seemed to hum in the thick air, like a stagnant heat wave.