48. Corpomantic

forty-eight

A bright blue flash lit up the trees, showing Milla her path in harsh, stark clarity.

Hands slicing through the air, she sped down the mound, across the flat, magickally charged earth, and tackled the witch who had dared to hex Darkly—the witch who had flung a hex that set off her phone—the chronomantic who had made her life a living hell for weeks on end.

They hit the ground, rolling and clawing at each other until they collided with the altar. Milla drove her knees into the witch’s waist and slammed her hands against their chest.

“ Frigidní .” She spat the hex Ezra had named Morgue Frost. Frigid cold bloomed from her palms, coating her hands, and she put all of her weight into her arms, pressing harder. “ Frigidní .”

Slick warmth met her touch as she sent flesh-eating frostbite into the witch, astral fingers driving between their ribs, prodding their lungs. Good Goddess, did C.R.O.W. hate this one. Ash spewed from her lips, the funeral mask around her eyes pinched, and she hexed them again. “ Frigidní .”

A terrified, pained wail left them even as their casting hand worked a rapid sigil and gripped her right arm. The cold sped from her hand, replaced by a crushing, withering pinch. She yelped, and the chronomantic bucked their hips, throwing Milla off. She rolled onto her hands and knees, pushing against the ground to rise, and her arm buckled, pain clawing up the limb.

She spared a glance at her casting hand, gagging at the sight of withered fingers and leathery skin tight against bone, the tips blackened around jagged nails.

Useless.

Not a great look overall, still, not her worst. Shoving to her feet, she whirled around and barely dodged a second hex. The edge of the altar behind her exploded in a cloud of dust, and she lobbed a fradey-hex at the witch—“ Boj se mě. ”—with her left hand, twisting around to make sure the sacrifice had not been hit.

Writhing on the altar, he appeared unharmed. If one forgave the fact he was naked, bound, and caught in the rapture of a ritual at its liminal edge. Muscles strained against his bindings, the veins in his neck stood out taut, and perfectly veneered teeth gnashed as a blood-red tendril traced his naked body.

Milla blinked. Blinked again, and blurted, “Holy shit, it’s—”

A hex like acid hit her in the shoulder. She screamed, slapping a hand down, working a rapid return to heal what she could, and pooling a decaying hex in her left hand as she turned.

Darkly got there first.

Face twisted in fury, he reached for the chronomantic. Shades bled from his eyes, and his mouth worked an intent she could not hear. The chronomantic choked, hands flying over their figure as if they could keep their Shade intact. In a final effort to avoid the punishment of the Dark Witch, they prodded their mask, shoved their fingers under the rim, and ripped it off.

“Please!” Cyrus shouted, throwing the mask aside and begging with his last breath. “Please, Keir. Help me!”

Darkly faltered, his hold on the Shade slipping, and Cyrus ran his hands in a rapid sigil, blurring out of sight.

“That FUCKER! ” Milla darted to where he had last been, reaching blindly, needing to grab him, choke him, ruin him .

Cyrus, the little shit. In the swamp, in her cell, in her home . Fucking with her head and time, making Milla believe she was going mad while helping her and teaching Diego. She should have known, but she’d been too stupid to recognize the evidence staring her right in the face. But the E.R.I.E. did not lie, and she’d left it running after drinking her tea. It caught his signature, and she had assumed it was an echo. The residual of his Way once she’d learned what he was. Again, choosing to believe the lie she told herself rather than face the painful, hideous truth, she got played.

Goddess she was so tired of getting played by these witches.

Trust among us is necessary, Lou had said.

Trust, my ASS.

“Where are you?” she bellowed, lobbing hex after hex in a circle—rotting, festering, noxious hexes—praying one would land and show her where Cyrus, the coward, was lurking.

“ Where are you? ” Her eyes burned—Goddess, they burned—and she tasted ash. Her right hand was useless and deadened. Her only hexes were off-target, and he was there but not, and she needed to … needed to …

Lighting cracked. Red crashed against the earth in front of Darkly, illuminating his sharp, terrible features, and the sacrifice screamed.

Stay focused, Millapet.

Focus. She needed to focus. Focus on rotting that tiny little witch to nothing.

She flung another necro hex, rotting a patch of grass near the woods. Nothing. And again. Nothing. Not a yelp, a gasp, a blur in the air.

Sobbing in frustration, she grasped the boline at her throat, sliced her arm, and flung her arm at the nothing. “ Moje ?epel! ”

A scythe of blood flew across the empty space. A voice cried out, the grass crumpled, and Cyrus’s stooped figure blurred into view.

“You.” She advanced, hands flying in sigils, ash drifting from her lips. “You were there that night. Who else?”

“Please,” Cyrus burbled, hacking blood in the grass. “You do not—”

“Don’t what? ” Milla switched intents, drawing on all of her anger, her rage. “Don’t understand? Then explain it to me. Who else was there?”

Cyrus hung his head, panting in wet, bubbling rasps. He raised his head and grinned at her, that utterly unforgettable face searing itself into Milla’s mind. Blood dribbled from the corners of his mouth, staining his teeth. His dark, dull eyes wheeled in their sockets, and his laugh—that laugh. It rattled in her skull, threatening to draw her back to the cells. A band tightened around her chest, fear lodging itself in her throat as his face began to blur, the features vanishing behind whatever chrono-magick he had just cast.

“So close, magissa,” he taunted, rising slowly to his feet. He wrapped an arm around his front, limping toward her. Bursts of deep red and bright blue lit up the woods and the ritual grounds, illuminating the spreading bloodstain on his shirt. Even with her left arm, Milla’s aim had been good—she’d struck him on the side, slicing deep into his ribs and lungs. “Better act quickly. Time is not on your side.”

He dropped his arm and blurred more. Milla’s fingers tingled, her toes. Her belly lurched, but now that she knew it was chronomancy, that it was him , she was ready.

“ Nehybejte se. ” She pressed the sigil in front of her. Don’t move. The blurring ceased. Cyrus stood before her, less than an arm’s length away, smudged around the edges, his face frozen in shock. Milla mimicked his grin, acid spittle singeing her lips as she pressed her palm over his heart and gave in to the witch she was. “ Rozlo?it. ”

Rot.

Cyrus choked out a cry, eyes flickered, tears falling. Rot crawled across his front, and black veins wormed up his throat, cupping his jaw, climbing into his mouth. Teeth blackened, his lips shriveled. His body flickered—blurring and twitching through time, but the rot was too far gone. Milla’s intent too sound, her desire too great, and her sacrifice the weeks upon weeks she spent in that cell at his mercy.

A dry, brittle laugh escaped, and she restrained the hex, cocking her head to the side in invitation.

“She’s going to get what she wants.” Cyrus wheezed. His eyes, dull and shimmering with the gray of advanced cataracts, gazed at nothing.

“Who.” Milla did not ask. The Death Witch demanded. Multiple bolts hit the ground, lighting up the entire ritual grounds a terrible red. Cyrus’s laugh breezed out of him, the last gasp of a drained bellows.

“Too late.”

Millapet.

She twisted, searching for the other voice that lived in her head as Cyrus hacked and gasped. A terrible silence had fallen, blanketing the glade so the dying chronomantic was the only sound.

Why did you call me here for this?

“I didn’t.” She released Cyrus, searching the dark for Ezra, but he was Gone—Gone because of her, because of this ritual, Gone at the Gates.

What did you do?

And the Gates were opening.

Tobias’s clean, bright flame shot across the dark void behind her, painting the scene in a master’s oils:

The sacrifice bound on the altar, back bowed, his hips striving upward, mouth wide open in a scream. A ghostly light rose from his body, attaching itself to the ritual leader standing over him, boline blade lowering. Their eyes gleamed sepulchral behind a mask as they mouthed their never-ceasing chant, and Darkly.

He loomed behind and beside the ritual leader, far gone into his Way. Every angle of him was keen as a blade, his eyes murderous black, his mouth a slash. Shades whipped around him, cloaking the witch and crowning him as their master. He reached for the ritual leader, and black smoke seethed from their arm, heeding his command.

What did you do?

“I left you there,” Milla said. She turned her back on Cyrus, drifting toward the altar in a daze. The world was beyond dark. Shadow wafted like dense fog with her every step, clinging softly to her legs and whispering through her hair. “I left you at the Gates where no one could reach you.”

Why?

“We went too far,” she admitted the truth—the point of her failure. She was not weak. She was not afraid of the witch that was her husband. They had gone too far, and though she could stop the Gates from opening, Ezra, in all his wisdom, had never accounted for this one point of failure. “I couldn’t bring you back. The tether broke. The Baron had been summoned, and you were the best available vessel—the only vessel.”

Tobias’s mouth moved in a shout, the sound carried away by the Shades. Red tendrils shot to the ground, connecting with the altar and the earth. He deflected what he could, sending fireballs and plumes of liquid flame at the bolts, but there were too many, coming too fast.

They slithered up Darkly’s legs, around his waist, painting that lovely face electric-red, and the damn fool witch was oblivious.

“We went too far.” Milla raised her face to the sky and the pinpoint of dreaded light bleeding through. “I had already lost you to the Baron, and the tether was broken.” Milla was a Death Witch. Realms of the dead welcomed her with open arms and were loathe to let her go. But for the living … the living were never meant to traverse the Neitherworld. Never meant to gaze upon the Gates, much less open them. “Our connection was severed. If I summoned you home, I would lose you all over again.” Her eyes burned, and she let the ashen tears fall. “I couldn’t do it.”

Millapet.

“I can’t do this again.”

She blinked, and time screeched back into place. Sound rushed in like a tidal wave, battering Milla back against the shore of her failures.

Another tendril streaked toward Darkly, and Milla’s intent blazed to life:

Get Darkly out of here, stop the summons, spare the sacrifice.

“Tobias!” Milla shouted, tongue thick in her mouth. “If he tears out that Shade, he kills them both!” She thrust her arm out, lobbing a weak enfeebling hex at a descending tendril and pointing at the ritual leader.

Tobias snuffed out his flame, face jerking between Milla, the tendrils, Darkly, and the altar. He cursed in German, shook out his arms, and they erupted in a crystalline blaze.

“Can you stop him?”

“I don’t know,” she yelled back as she jogged up close.

“Well, try.” He threw his fist at the sky, sending a punch of flame at a new tendril. And again and again, jabbing one and sending another careening into the dark with a right hook. It was metal as hell, and Milla didn’t have the time to appreciate it.

Darkly curled the fingers of his outstretched hand, and Milla jolted into action, darting around the altar with every intent of tackling the oblivious witch to the ground. The Shade seething from the ritual leader tensed, tightening like thread caught in fingers, and they swayed, stuttering over their chant.

Tongues of scarlet and neon magick lashed at the ground, seeking a foothold in one of the three witches now bound by Shade, granting Milla and Tobias a slim reprieve.

“Darkly!” She sent another tendril sizzling away from the altar, calling out to her Dark Witch. “Keir, please, you need to shadestep!”

He twitched a lip at the sound of his name and wrenched the ritual leader’s Shade. Drawn to the surge of his Way, the brückengeist latched onto his casting hand, sizzling down to his wrist and worming beneath the hex-resistant fabric.

“No!” She flung a desecration hex with her left hand, and for once, it didn’t go wild. The hex splattered against the tendril. Wool burned, burning flesh filled her nose, and Darkly released a soul-sundering howl of pain. But the tendrils slipped away.

Her world went blurry from the amount of magick she’d just used in short order, her body catching up to the cost. Head spinning, stomach heaving, the hurt winnowed into bones. It was too much, too soon after the ritual. The tea had helped, but it was not enough, and that thing was going to take her Dark Witch if she did not act.

Darkly was going to kill that witch and their sacrifice if she did not act.

Milla clenched her teeth, dragging the depths of her Way. Darkly had survived a blight from her before, so she flung one now. The hex splattered against his desecrated left hand, and his skin withered further, tightening over the bones of those clever fingers.

The Shade snapped back into the ritualist, and it was a King in Smoke and Shadow who raised his right hand against the Death Witch.

His fingers clawed, and in the deepest, darkest places of her, he tugged, wrenching what remained of Milla’s Shade free. It splintered through bone and burned through her pores, dragging the last breaths from her lungs.

A whisper of a shadow pulled from her arms and chest, hovering as Milla watched, helpless to the command he held over her, unable to think of anything but the pain, the cold, and how in the sickest way possible, this felt a little like coming home—and he released. Her Shade snapped into place, and Milla hit the ground, wheezing and gasping.

Blue flame erupted to her left, searing the ends off another tendril winding around Darkly’s waist. Tobias moved into the field of her vision, snapping out a whip of cold blue fire at the lashing red vines. At the sight of his Way out in full force, Milla remembered three things in rapid succession:

Tobias had survived the burnout at Beltane and was the first to recover after Tallahassee.

His flame burned cold, unlike any spalování she had ever known.

And Darkly had suffered a burnout before.

Dinnae fancy reliving the experience.

A burnout caused by Tobias.

“Tobias,” Milla gasped, pushing at her knee to rise. In the cells, when he dispelled the illusions, and just now on the mound with Darkly’s allure, Horned God , she was blind. She teetered to the side, hardly able to stand. “Burn them off.”

“What?” he shouted over the altar.

“That’s your job, isn’t it?” She gestured around them with an angry, withered hand. “Burn off the shadows, take him down.”

“Are you certain?”

“One hundred percent,” Milla lied. She readied a hex in her palm. “I’ve got the ritualist; you save my Dark Witch.”

To his credit, he wasted no time.

Blue flame flared in his palms, burning brighter and brighter until Milla had to look away. Darkly was lost to his wretched work, already summoning the ritualist’s Shade, the idiot. And the ritualist spewed their summons to the sky. It was going to be a near thing, a close thing, but Milla had faith in Tobias, as unforgivably weird as that was.

“Close your eyes, Milla,” he warned.

The burning blue erupted into a blinding white. Tobias’s silhouette imprinted behind her lids as she clenched her eyes and ducked behind the altar. Clamping her hand over her left ear, Milla pressed her right against the stone as a high-pitched whistle screamed from his flame, ascending beyond mortal pitch. All sound belled out of the world, and the boom of a thunderclap rattled her bones. She might have been screaming, her mouth was open, and her throat was raw, but there was no sound. No way to tell. A flash sweat broke out over her skin, darkness soothed the burning in her closed eyes, and it was time to move.

Milla lurched to her feet as Darkly collapsed, smoke curling from his body and joining the haze of disrupted magick. She flung out her left hand with the last dregs of her Way, striking the ritual leader in the chest and throat with a wicked blight. They screamed, the high-pitched shriek of a woman in pain, and the summons finally ceased.

The ritualist dropped her boline to the ground and clawed at her throat as if she could tear the blighting hex away. Milla’s stomach lurched. She gagged, and she staggered forward, the ground heaving and roiling beneath her feet.

And then she stopped.

Just … stopped.

Her feet froze, her legs seized, and her lungs stopped their bellows. Milla was no better than a living statue with a very short lifespan. Blood slowed in her veins, and her heart beat out one, two … three …. four …..

When the fifth beat never came, Milla finally remembered the corpomantic.

Her panic was immediate and immediately stopped. She had no heartbeat to be frantic, no pulse to skyrocket, no breath to come in sharp little bursts, and the strain on her body was immense. The dam of her rising hysteria placed a splintering pressure on her bones that would have earned a wail had Milla a mouth to scream. Each joint felt brittle as eggshells, her kneecaps ready to shatter. Every muscle and tendon drawn taut enough to tear, and there was no release, no relief. She was trapped, held by the whim of someone else, and she was going to die.

She was going to die.

Unable to breathe, unable to scream or close her eyes or fling a hex. Unable to fight, Milla was going to die.

So she did the one thing she could still do. Burning through the last of her reserves, she dove into that burning kernel of latent magick at the heart of her.

And she killed herself.

The world flickered out, darkness fell, and Milla felt a presence in the nothing. A weighted gaze and the suggestion of curved horns rising in the dark. She drew a ragged breath as her lungs started their bellows. Her fingers and toes prickled, the muscles in her extremities spasming as blood rushed back into her veins. She pushed herself up from the ground, her right arm still useless but enlivening with each beat of her renewed heart. Her eyes took in a haze of blurry gray light bending to define shapes by dimension and then color as the corpomantic hex was fully dispelled.

A whirl of sound and movement drew her attention to fleeing robes disappearing through the trees with Tobias in swift pursuit.

She stood on wobbling legs, too fast for someone who was just dead and half-collapsed against the altar. Pale moonlight washed over the stone, not the sickening red pulse of the brückengeist, and no wicked intent filled the air. Instead, she heard crickets.

Groaning, Milla flexed the fingers of her right hand and rolled her shoulder. Dispelling hexes and curses was decidedly not an enjoyable experience, and she had just done it twice in the span of, what, ten minutes? Less?

Grasping the edge of the altar, she retrieved the ritualist’s boline, dropped dangerously close to the sacrifice’s head, and leaned heavily against the stone.

“And they say Imma creepy witch.” Milla slurred to the man tied on the altar, inebriated beyond the point where she should be handling a blade. He blinked bleary brown eyes at her, mouth working to form words but wholly unable to do so. Gripping the handle, she brought the blade against the leather strap. Her eyes focused on the bones in the man’s wrist, at his pulse fluttering there, and a drunken laugh burbled past her lips. “Probly shouldn’ be usin’ a knife rihhnow.”

“What was that?” The man tried to flinch away, unable to move more than a centimeter.

“Ah-ah-ah,” Milla shook her head, clicking her tongue and waving the blade in his face as she sang, “If you move, I’ll cut you.”

The warning sounded more like a gleeful threat, and the man whimpered, pressing his head against the stone to get as far away from the boline as possible.

Milla muttered an apology and pinched the blade in her fingers. Terrible idea, but better than slipping and cutting his wrist as she sawed the strap. The thick rope fell away, and she sent the poor man a sloppy smile, hiccuping as she slid the handle into his freed hand. He made quick work of the other strap, then pushed himself upright with a groan.

“Are y’all witches?”

“Yessir.” Milla blinked at him, still amused and bewildered by what she was seeing. He split into three blurry versions of himself, and she blinked again, settling the fractured image into one very startled, very recognizable face. “Yer nekkid,” she hiccuped again, “and yer Stefan Holfstaedter.”

He sighed, ran a hand through his hair, and splayed his fingers between them. “It’s pronounced Steeeven . With a long ‘e’.”

“You bought my store,” she informed him, teetering forward. His crotch rose to meet her, or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, Milla became well acquainted with Stefan and his long “e”, informing him, “I hate it,” before passing out in his lap.