28. Desecration

twenty-eight

“Again,” Tobias barked.

Sweat rolled down Milla’s back. Her arm trembled, fingers of her casting hand shaking, and Holy Horned God, was she drunk. She braced her elbow with her left hand and gnashed her teeth, swallowing another cry of frustration and no small amount of nausea.

They had been at this for hours, starting with small returns so Cyrus could tune his E.R.I.E. to her Way, moving up to desecrations, and finally, a complicated hand-to-hex casting that comprised of Tobias flinging fireballs at her, and Milla trying to deflect them before they singed her fishnets.

Or, at least, that’s what she thought the exercise was. The world had gotten a little fuzzy in the last hour, and honestly, it was a miracle she was still standing.

“I need a break.”

“You may have a break when you cast properly,” he replied, pointing to the grass. “Desecrate.”

“ Odsv— hic— odsvětit. ” When they’d started with this exercise, she’d been happy. Thankful, even, to be working simple decays and returns. Like riding a bike, the desecration hex had rolled off her tongue, crumpling the grass around their sparring court. But after hours of a slow descent into a waking hangover, the warm-up exercise had become Tobias’ go-to punishment whenever she whined for a break.

It was the witchy equivalent of burpees, and Milla hated it.

“ Návrat .” The return, a low-level healing allure, dribbled off her clumsy tongue, bleeding green into the brittle blades until it was as though she’d never cast her hex at all.

Milla scrunched her eyes, closed one and then the other, and cast her desecration again. “ Odsvětit. ”

The grass withered and browned, crumbling to dust. On a nearby bench, Cyrus’s thumbs flew over his screen as he adjusted the E.R.I.E.

“This is incredible,” he whispered in awe. “Chronomantic, to hippocromantic, and that last one had a sawtooth waveform.” His utterly unremarkable eyes peered at her over the tablet. In truth, his entire face was a blur at this point. Ink splots where his eyes should be, a darker smudge for his mouth. The smudge widened in what she took to be a smile. “For a moment, your casting looked meteomantic! Why do you think that is?”

Milla swayed, took a step to keep upright, and teetered in the other direction.

The technomancy behind the E.R.I.E. had always fascinated her. She made a mental note to have Cyrus run her through how to use the one on her phone and then to have Diego explain it to her like she was five. But right now, she was in no shape to wax theoretical on the whys or hows of her Way.

“Iunno.” She shrugged and hiccuped again. “Grass is dead, yeah?”

“Incredible,” he repeated, “do it again.” Though softer than Tobias’s, Cyrus’s demand was no less firm.

Milla blew her bangs out of her face and shook out her arms, stretching her neck from side to side. She’d long ago pulled her hair into a messy bun, and curling, sweaty tendrils clung to her neck.

A chilled wind rushed from the field like Darkly had heard her silent wish for air conditioning. She looked over in time to see him volley a wall of midnight at his sister, her jaw dropping when Lou reached for the sky, pulled down a beam of sunshine, and sheared the wall in two.

“Holy shit.” Milla backstepped, her bootheel catching the wooden beam at the edge of the sparring pit. She tipped off balance and landed hard on her ass, gawking at the shadow and light show on the field.

The Simmons Siblings had started by running laps, which Milla and her little hexes thought was egregious, before moving on to hand-to-hand sparring with Donmar and individual castings on their own, but somewhere along the way, their friendly workout had become a full-on brawl.

“Oh.” Cyrus followed her gaze to the field, hopping to his feet with the tablet held out. He circled two fingers at Milla, jerking his chin at the field. “This is wonderful. Do you think you could—”

“Not today,” Tobias called from the far side of the pit. “Milla can barely stand; if we add Keir’s Way to the mix, she will be even more useless.”

“The fuck, man.” She glared back at him. “Does he tell you everything?”

Tobias did not humor her with a reply.

On the field, Darkly flung a handful of obsidian blades like a carnival knife thrower. They tore through Lou’s rift in quick succession, one-two-three .

She deflected the first two with a basic shield, but the third caught her on the elbow, spinning her a quarter turn. She grunted, shaking out her arm as the knife dissipated into a whorl of smoke. From the pained look on her face, Milla was willing to wager that Darkly had done something to the Shade, granting it a weight or force. She made a mental note to ask him about that as well.

“Get your arm in tighter!” Darkly jeered, dropping into an easy lunge and scooping one arm, collecting the remains of his Shades like they were saltwater taffy on a pull.

Lou barked a laugh and flicked her fingers, sending five pinpoints of light across the field. Darkly cursed and spun, reaching for the trees. His fingers curled, and he jerked his arm back. For a heartbeat, nothing happened, and then bright, hot sunlight pounded down on Milla.

She yelped, jumping up fast enough to send the world into a tizzy. Tobias grabbed her elbow, keeping her from toppling over, and she ripped her arm free, staggering on shaking legs and squinting at the field where every shadow from the trees seethed at Darkly’s feet.

Beyond him, squinting in the same bright sunlight, Donmar held a ready casting stance, acting as the referee for this sibling showdown. Beside him, Rai clutched her teak box to her chest, watching the match with a bright smile as the shadows rose and stretched into a pillar, a wall, swallowing half the field and reaching for Lou.

She raised her arm, forming a weak shield as she turned in a slow circle, scanning the shadows and the sun-drenched field.

“Focus,” Cyrus muttered. Lou’s face twitched in his direction, and a stygian ball of Shades heaved from the shadows, colliding with the back of her head.

“Bollocks!” She staggered forward and Darkly darted out of the shadows.

“Focus, Lou,” he taunted. She whirled around, and he sent a dictionary-sized Shade to her face. It wrapped around her head, and a cumulative “Oooooh” left every witch on the sidelines.

“A shadowblind?” Milla asked.

“Ja,” Tobias chuckled and released her arm, stepping away. “She hates those.”

Lou clawed at her face, her shriek of fury muffled by the Shade. Pinpricks of light appeared at her fingertips, glowing brighter and brighter as she dispelled Darkly’s magick.

But he wasn’t done. Keeping at a distance, he felled his wall with a sweep of his arm and whipped a ribbon of midnight at Lou’s legs. It wrapped around her ankles, and when she tried to take a step—he tugged.

Lou landed on her ass, shadowblind and furious. The whip vanished in a puff of smoke as her dispellation took hold, revealing a Light Witch madder than a cat in a bathtub.

“Called!” Donmar shouted, throwing an arm up. In a wink, the Shades vanished. Shadow shot across the field and tucked into the trees as Darkly stalked forward, offering his sister a hand. She accepted, and he hauled a laughing Lou to her feet.

“Good match, wee yin.” She clapped her hand against Darkly’s shoulder and lightly cuffed him on the arm. “I haven’t seen you work that hard in weeks! Fair play.”

“Aye.” He scanned the edge of the field, frowning when he spotted Milla wavering where she stood with a drunken smile on her face. “Are we done?” he asked Lou.

“For now, yes.” She freed her hair, working her fingers through the shimmery mass before re-tying it into a tail. “I could bloody well use a shower.”

“Good.” Darkly leaned into a long-legged stride, making it one step before he froze, black eyes darting to the ground, then to Milla. His mouth opened in surprise, and at that exact moment, Milla felt the tiniest, almost infinitesimal tug.

“Wait.” She stepped back, eyes dropping to the ground. And again, a tug, a pull, a tipping of scales. “What the fu—”

“Ludmilla,” Tobias barked. She ripped her head up, and he lobbed a caustic blue ball of flame at her face. “Catch.”

“ Udusit se! ” The hex flew from her lips without thought, her fingers forming the sigil from sheer muscle memory. Suffocate . A snuffing, killing hex that would read as hippocromantic, trained into her year after year on Big Torch Key.

Harmless sparks burst and sizzled in the air, falling away to reveal a second sputtering ball of flame flying at her face.

She crooked and bent the fingers of her left hand, weakly drawing the sigil for a ward and ducking to the side when the casting failed. A cold so deep it burned seared across her shoulder. Milla cried out, whipping her head up as fury overtook surprise.

“What the fuck, Tobias!”

“Dispell it, Ludmilla.” Face blank, Tobias lobbed a third fireball at her—but it wasn’t quite fire, was it? Crystalline blue, the same color as his eyes, sparking as it flew across the distance.

“Hells no.” She caught it at the last second, the muscle memory of a lifetime again coming to her aid. “ P?evzít. ” Take hold. Trapped in the web of her Way, the cold fire burned over her palm, the energy from Tobias’ hex wanting to be used and unable to escape. Growing in intensity and beyond cold.

Milla blinked at the caustic fireball, recognizing that this was no simple spalování flame.

Her father was a spalování. Milla had seen the deep orange fire he wielded in the winters of her youth, lighting the hearth and birthday candles, burning mulch in the fall. Her father’s Way manifested as heat and warmth, evoking thoughts of hot chocolate and hugs.

Tobias’s flame was cold fury.

“Dispell it,” he demanded.

“And be useless?” Milla thrust out her right hand, fingers dancing in a blur as she drew a rapid sigil in the air. “No, thank you.” Her head swam, the cost of her Way taking more and more and more, but she would be Horned God-damned before she gave in to another one of his demands. Better to be functionally drunk than dysfunctional altogether.

She dropped the take-hold hex and slammed her left hand against the back of her right in one fluid movement, hissing a new intent.

“ Stra?ny oheň. ” Clenching her teeth against the burn, Milla ruined the brilliance of that blue fireball, twisting Tobias’s magick into something of her own—a seething ball of pure necrotic energy Ezra had once referred to as “dreadfire.”

It fizzed and popped, deepening in color until the core blackened, and a gray cloud of ash spun in a dervish around the heart of the flame. She felt the void of it in her palm, the weight of the nothing. It thrilled her deep in her bones, this utter decay and destruction—desecration on the atomic level—a facet of her Way so long ignored.

Cold wind teased her hair, wrapping around Milla and feeding her Way. The tips of her fingers darkened, stars burst in her eyes, and the blackened flame deepened to a void. Tobias stepped back, raising his hand in alarm with delicious fear in his eyes.

“By the Goddess,” Cyrus gasped beside her, tap-tap-tapping away. She paid him no heed. What did a Death Witch need with E.R.I.E.’s and reports when she was the beginning and the end of magick incarnate?

At that thought, something like certainty stretched and yawned deep in her chest, a reawakening thing ready to be unleashed. Power flooded her body from the feet up, strengthening her stance and Way.

Horned God, it would be so easy to end him. To end them all and walk away without looking back at the destruction. To leave this entire range a charnel field and spread her rot across the land.

Not yet.

Milla blinked, hauled from the depths of her Way by a new, unknown voice booming in her mind. The blackened void in her hand wobbled and listed to the side. “Oh, fuck!” She grasped at her failing intent, tossing the ball of magick from hand to hand. Racking her brain for what to spin it into, how to snuff it out, and flinging it away from herself with a cry of, “ Na popel! ”

To ash!

“Scheisse.” Tobias leapt to the side as the smoldering ball hurled in his direction.

A cloud of ash exploded against his shoulder, masking half of his face in charcoal black powder. Milla had one brief second to revel in the hit before he snarled in guttural German. Flame burned in his eyes and his hand, the blue so bright and intense that Milla knew at a glance it would be more painful than anything he’d thrown at her. He reared back, she raised both hands in ready wards, and shock stole the rage from his face.

“Verdammt!” Tobias snuffed out the flame and raised his hand in warning, eyes dropping to her feet. “Ludmilla, give it back.”

“Give what—” She followed where his gaze. It took her a beat to realize what had happened, and then the shock at the voice in her head vanished in a rush. “Oh, Goddess.”

Shadow teemed at her feet, frothing and roiling like a heavy fog. She swallowed and followed the faded path of the Shades, twisting around and clapping both hands over her mouth to keep from crying out. Darkly stood less than six feet away, his face pale and eyes a deep, insidious black.

“Give it back, Ludmilla,” Tobias repeated. “Do not let Lou see.”

“I don’t—” She edged away from the Shades, and they followed, slithering through her legs and around her ankles like needy cats. “I don’t know how.”

“Now,” Cyrus hissed. The urgency in his tone jarred Milla enough to look up and see Lou charging to their sparring pit. Light gleamed in both her hands and her eyes burned almost as bright as Tobias’s flame.

“Knock it off, Keir,” she ordered in her Enforcer voice.

“Milla,” Tobias warned, and Milla called on the only intent she could think of.

Thrusting her hand at the mass of shadow, she drew the banishing ward with her fingers and rasped, “ Létat. ”

Fly!

A breeze kicked up out of nowhere, blowing the Shades back to the Dark Witch. They wrapped around his legs and crawled up his arms, clinging to him like a living shroud.

Darkly blinked once, slowly, and a cruel slash of a smile split his lips. She knew that smile, had seen that smile as he trailed his fingers down her body, and reveled in it when he disappeared between her legs.

She pressed her knees together, biting her lips to cut off a whimper at seeing his darker, scarier self. The heat of her Way intensified, kicking up the moths in her belly and urging her forward. Just a step. A hair closer to Darkly to seize that raw power and take it, him, all for herself.

Not. Yet.

Again, that foreign voice invaded, raising Milla’s hand and crooking her fingers, twisting her intent and forcing it up and out of her throat.

“ Le?, stín .” Fly, Shade. “ A vra? mi moji temnou ?arodějnici. ”

Give me back my Dark Witch.

Darkly blinked again, a shiver twitching his shoulders as that glorious smile faded. The Shades siphoned into his figure, and he wavered in the grass, gazing at Milla in utter confusion before taking a step back only to stumble and land on his ass.