Chapter 16

16

EVANGELINE

T hat morning, I grabbed Marcus and pulled him aside. I'd slept in a T-shirt the night before to hide the cracks in my skin from Gabriel, and if he thought it was odd, he'd kept it to himself. I was grateful for that. I wanted to figure out what I was dealing with quietly, without freaking anyone else out unnecessarily.

"Is there somewhere we can talk in private?"

Marcus nodded, then led me to his bedroom. The place was tidier than I'd expected, probably because there was more space than there should have been. The furniture was on every surface, not just the floor, so the clutter was spread across the walls and ceiling, too. Marcus had walked easily up the wall to sit in an armchair, and when he snapped his fingers, the ottoman warped into a matching chair. I followed gingerly, feeling a twist of vertigo as my sense of which direction was down rotated ninety degrees.

"What's on your mind?" Marcus asked. His impish uncle act was turned down low, which meant he could tell I was worried.

Silently, I lifted the hem of my shirt so he could see my abdomen. The golden cracks had spread down far enough to almost reach my belly button. Marcus stared, his face paling, then his eyes flicked up to me.

"How long has this been happening?"

I found myself wishing that he was being a little goofier. The seriousness of his voice meant this was as bad as I feared, maybe even worse.

"Since right after the curse was broken," I said, letting my shirt fall back down. "Have you seen it before?"

"I've heard about it," Marcus said. "It's very rare. Does it hurt?"

"It aches a little," I said. "Usually when I've used a lot of power. I've been trying to keep the big spells to a minimum."

"That won't help, I'm afraid." He leaned back in his chair and took off his glasses, rubbing a hand over his eyes. He looked exhausted. With the glasses back in place, his eyes bore into mine. "If anything, the big spells might help. There's only so much magic the human body can contain, Evangeline. You're overloaded with power, and it's trying to break out." He spoke flatly, without the lilting whimsicality I was so used to.

"The curse was feeding off my magic," I said slowly. "It was keeping this from starting, wasn't it?"

"I suspect so."

"What happens if it keeps going?" I asked. "You said you've heard about stuff like this. What happened to the other people?"

Marcus hesitated, not meeting my eyes.

"I need to know," I pressed.

He sighed. "You aren't going to like it." He waved a hand and a globe on a tall three-legged stand tottered over. It was an elaborate thing, inlaid with stones for each country. The brass bands around it probably meant something.

"I figured I wouldn't. That's why I need to know."

The globe finished waddling over to me, and I leaned over to get a better look. The surface moved, zooming in, and the little inlaid stones shifted and changed. After a blur of magical masonry, I was suddenly looking at a spot in the Antarctic marked with golden lettering. This part of the map showed the coast of Antarctica, and the continent itself was made of white feldspar, floating in an ocean of pale blue quartz, according to the part of my brain that had gotten so used to magical bullshit, it could identify a wide spectrum of magically useful plants and minerals. Zoomed in this close, the globe wasn't smooth. The stone that made up the water was, but the land was textured in a way that looked like the natural shape of the rock, but I was willing to bet it was a perfect representation of the actual place's topography.

"Ross Crater," I read. The globe blurred and shifted again. Another set of lettering, this time picked out against the fire opal of eastern Australia. "Deniliquin Crater." Again, and now it was the Indian Ocean, made of azurite. "Shiva Crater." I got the message. "Enough," I snapped at the globe, and it waddled away, somehow managing to look chastened.

"Is that what always happens?" I asked Marcus. My voice was barely above a whisper, which I hated. I wanted to be calm and collected about this, but I simply couldn't manage it.

"Those are the stories magical history has remembered," Marcus said carefully. "I don't wish to give you false hope, but I will point out that people are more likely to remember someone exploding than they are to remember someone being a bit under the weather and then recovering."

I nodded, looking down at my hands. The craters had been massive, which I knew because the globe had provided pretty precise measurements. How much force had to leave the human body all at once to make a crater 372.8 miles across?

"What do I do?" I asked. I didn't know if I was asking Marcus or the universe at large. I didn't know if either of them would have an answer.

Marcus came over and knelt in front of my chair, cupping my hands in his dry, callused hands. "There are some things we can try. I've failed to prepare you for anything close to this level of magic, but there is still time for me to rectify that to the best of my abilities." I couldn't look him in the eye. "We know there are ways to draw away magic, Evangeline. Methods that have been used over the years. We can adapt them to help you. For now, stop holding yourself back from casting powerful spells. Getting the energy out will help you. We just need to find a way to make sure you're using more than you're taking in."

I sniffled, pulling one of my hands free to wipe at my wet cheeks. Marcus produced a handkerchief from one of his many pockets—monogrammed with someone else's initials, I noticed—and I wiped my face with it, then blew my nose. "Sorry," I said. "Snotty crier."

"You get that from your father." Marcus patted my hand. "The man had a face like a faucet. Now, you remember our lessons, I know that. What is the main role of a witch's familiar?"

"Being a source of magic, and also grounding it," I recited.

"Very good," Marcus said, and if I was in a better place I would've been embarrassed by how much that praise boosted me up. "You have Pothos with you now. He can help with some of this. I know he isn't properly your familiar, but he can still take on the role even without the binding ceremony. I'll ask some of my more trustworthy associates if they've heard anything about witches who managed to cure this. I'll pose it as a hypothetical interest, of course. And in the meantime, I'll see about getting something set up to keep you balanced. A mobile version of the devices like the one you mentioned finding in Chanel. In the very worst case, we have a fallback," he added, tapping the band of the damaged magic-stopping tattoo around my arm. "If things get really bad, we can refresh this with the intention of removing it later on."

I nodded. "I don't want to explode," I managed in a tiny voice. It was a wild enough sentence that it startled a laugh out of me.

"I solemnly promise that I will do everything in my power to keep you from exploding," Marcus said. He rubbed my hand and stood. "Come on. I know just the thing to take your mind off this. I think it's time to show you the secret project I've been working on."

My head wasn't exactly clear after that, but I definitely felt more together. It was nice to know what I was facing, even if it was horrible. At least it meant my mind couldn't conjure up even more horrible possibilities. Knowing that I should use my magic was also a huge weight off, given how much was depending on me.

I trailed after Marcus, and Gabriel sauntered over to join us, putting an arm around my waist. "Are you all right?" he asked softly. "You look troubled."

I managed a smile. "Yeah. Everything's fine." I would tell him tonight. I didn't want to do a striptease in the middle of the safe house, and I knew Gabriel would want to see the cracks.

Besides, things were sort of under control. I had a fallback. I probably wouldn't explode. Being able to teleport again without worrying meant it would be simple to get to the school. Simple, that is, as long as I could find it. I'd never teleported to a specific location without having been there before.

Luckily, Marcus's secret project was supposed to help with that. "Behold," he said, pulling a sheet away from the table he and Isabella had been working on. "A ley line map!"

"Behold?" Isabella mouthed behind him, rolling her eyes. The thing on the table did kind of deserve to be beheld, though. The twists of wire and odd trinkets had come together in a sprawling map of Eldoria and its surrounding area. The buildings were uncannily accurate, to the point that when I bent in close, I spotted a tiny version of Chanel the size of my pinkie nail. Lines of light twisted through the wire shapes of the buildings, glowing brightly where they intersected. Those were the spots where I could leave the stream of magic. It reminded me of a subway map, but unfortunately, the actual version with wiggly lines and a weird layout instead of the smoothed out, streamlined version they put on the signs. Still, it was better than going by intuition and luck.

The school barely fit onto the map, hidden all the way at the end of the table. Trees made out of Q-tips had been cut in half, stuck cotton-side up, and painted green surrounded it. The incredible artistry of the tiny wire building was somehow only made more impressive by the grade school level arts and crafts forest.

"What's that?" Gabriel asked, pointing at a plastic spider half-hidden between some of the cotton trees. "Does that indicate some sort of defense mechanism at the school, or an enemy?" He studied the map with childlike wonder, and it was adorable to see.

"That? Oh, no, that's just a plastic spider," Marcus said, picking it up and pocketing it. "I wondered where I'd left that."

Once I knew exactly where we were going, getting to the school was just a question of dipping into the stream of magic and counting the crossroads we passed. It had been simple to slide Gabriel and myself down into the key line, and I'd pulled us back up into reality in exactly the right spot. It felt like we were deep in the woods, although in Eldoria's forests, that could happen with just a few trees between you and the city. We'd reappeared on a wide gravel drive that led up to a sprawling building, the sort of brick structure brisling with square towers that always popped into my head when I thought about college buildings. The place was overgrown with moss and vines, and several of the windows were broken. I could barely read the carving above the door that said, in imposing all caps: WRAITHWOOD SCHOOL. Below that, carved in smaller letters, was the motto: Creare Inopinatum.

"What does it say?" I asked Gabriel. He'd been weirdly quiet all day, and I was too caught up in my own stuff to dig it out of him. Still, it struck me as kind of odd that he hadn't found something catty to say about the architecture. Gabriel loved being catty about architecture.

"Create the unexpected," he said. "Which, I have to admit, isn't reassuring to read before entering an abandoned building to search for leads."

"Let's hope that anything unexpected the students created is long gone," I said.

There were no signs of anyone, but tracks could be covered. In unspoken agreement, Gabriel and I avoided the huge front doors. There were plenty of other entrances, although most of them seemed to have been tacked on as an afterthought. We found a nice big broken window, and Gabriel, ever the gentleman, cleaned out the last of the broken glass from the frame before we ventured inside.

The inside was cold and dark, like the light from the broken windows was being swallowed up before it could actually illuminate anything. There was rustling down the hall, and I froze, but Gabriel cocked his head to the side and then shook it.

"Rats," he said. "I don't hear anything larger."

We picked our way through the building. I'd been in plenty of abandoned places before—hazard of the job—but it usually felt different. The school seemed to have been tidied for summer break and then someone had locked the door and never come back. Chairs were stacked against the walls, and the chalkboards still had the dusty traces of lessons scribbled on them. We passed a corkboard in the hallway where a yellowed flyer for the school's play was still pinned. They'd been doing Hamlet, which struck me as a little ambitious.

Gabriel suddenly went very still, eyes going unfocused. I could practically see his ears pricking up. "There's something below us," he murmured eventually. "Someone. I hear a voice."

"Let's check it out."

We found a stairwell behind a thick wooden door that spiraled down into the darkness. I didn't want to risk floating up some lights for us. I had no idea who Gabriel had heard, but I was absolutely goddamn sure I wanted to have surprise on my side when we found them.

We made it a few steps down when the door at the top of the stairs slammed shut behind us. I jumped, and Gabriel twitched as well.

"Do you see anyone?" I whispered.

"I can barely see the top of the stairs."

"God, I fucking hate this," I said.

"Give me your hand," Gabriel murmured. With my hand in his, he took the lead, using his vampiric vision to lead us down the stairs. It was oddly nerve-wracking, even after all of the shit I'd faced. Trusting someone else to make sure I didn't tumble down the steep stairs made me feel incredibly vulnerable. The fact that the someone else in question was Gabriel helped, but I wasn't exactly enjoying myself.

We picked our way carefully down the stairs. And down. And down. Frowning, I tugged Gabriel to a stop.

"Can you hear anyone in here with us?" I asked.

"No."

I cast a little light charm, starting it off dim so it wouldn't hurt our eyes. At first, it threw a little circle of light around us. I could see a few steps on either side of us, the mildewed wall, and a splintered wooden handrail on the other side. I brightened the light slowly until I could see the landings above and below us. The door we'd come through was barely a dozen steps away.

"I thought Theo said this place was drained of magic," Gabriel said.

"They did," I replied grimly. "But you can cast new spells on an old building."

"Let's keep moving," Gabriel said. "I don't like this."

We kept walking. It was faster going now we could both see, which was a relief. We got to a landing, kept moving down. Another landing, which completed the circuit. This one had a door on it. The stairs kept going down, spiraling off into the darkness below us.

"Dim the light," Gabriel said. "We don't want to be spotted when I open the door." I turned the light down to a mere flicker, holding it in my hands to dim it even more. But when he tried the door, the knob didn't turn.

"Locked?" I asked.

"Or stuck," he said with a frown. He braced one foot against the doorframe and yanked hard. The old, damaged wood gave way, splintering around the handle. The door swung open from the momentum with a raspy creak. So much for the element of surprise.

"Ah," Gabriel said, sounding nonplussed.

"What?" I asked.

"I think you may as well turn the light back up."

I did, and saw what was beyond the door. It was a smooth brick wall. The door went nowhere.

"Okay, that could've gone better," I said.

We went back up the stairs, but when I got to the middle landing between the two doors, I stopped in my tracks. Up above us on the next stairwell, the door we'd come through was now hanging open, its handle splintered away, revealing a brick wall.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," I muttered.

"What—Oh. Yes. That's…" Gabriel frowned. "Excuse me. I expect I'll be right back."

Before I could ask him where exactly he planned on going, he vaulted over the railing of the stairway and plunged down into the darkness.

"Gabriel!" I yelled, rushing over and trying to spot him. It was useless. He was dark haired, wearing a dark coat, and dropping into the dark, so he was basically camouflaged. "What the fuck?" I hissed.

But then there was a blur of movement and a soft ‘oof' as Gabriel dropped down from the stairs above and landed right next to me. He dusted his coat off nonchalantly.

"I thought as much," he said. "It?—"

I shut him up with a furious kiss.

"What the fuck?" I said again when I pulled away. "What the fuck!"

"I wanted to test a theory," he said weakly, looking dazed.

"What if you were wrong?"

"That would've been a useful data point?" he tried.

I glared at him.

"An unfortunate data point," he said sheepishly. "It's not as though I would've been killed."

"No, but you could've wound up somewhere else. We don't know what the limits of the spell are. What if we'd gotten separated?"

Was I overreacting? I didn't care. I had a lot on my plate, and I didn't need this sort of reckless bullshit stressing me out even more. All the tears that hadn't come out earlier were eager to join the fun now, and I blinked them back.

"Evangeline," Gabriel said worriedly, stepping closer and looking down at me with a furrowed brow. "Evangeline, I'm sorry." He bent down and kissed me, and it was much softer than the panicked one I'd given him.

With my face cupped in his hands and his mouth against mine, I did feel safer. I kissed him back, and felt a few tears sliding down my cheeks. When he pulled back, he rested his forehead against mine.

"Don't scare me like that," I muttered.

"I'll do my best," he murmured.

I let him hold me like that for a minute, then wiped my cheeks.

"All right, good news and bad news," I said. "Which one do you want first?"

"Bad news?"

"Bad news is that this place might not have any of its old magic left, but there's definitely some magical bullshit going on."

"And the good news?" Gabriel asked.

"The good news is that whoever you heard isn't in this particular stairwell," I said. "Which means I can give us enough light."

That was when we heard the giggle, and my heart dropped to my stomach.

"You're wrong!" said a voice. It was high pitched and clearly young, just on the wrong side of grating. "I'm right here, silly!"