Cast Into Darkness (31 page)

“What do you need to do to fix me?” She huddled in a tight ball on the floor.
Better sell it.

Melina shrugged. “Work with the stone, and you. Understand the connection between the two of you so that I can reverse what it did.”

“Why would you? You don’t have any reason to help me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. Don’t you understand what you did in the bedroom? What almost happened? Kate, there’s a reason we stopped using primal magic. One that isn’t in the history books. Primal magic takes what it wants. We can’t control it for long. And when it slips the leash we try to put on it, thousands die. Makrises as well as Hamiltons.”

Shit. Kate had felt the hunger of the power inside her, the insatiable appetite that lurked underneath that dark ocean. Melina could be telling the truth.

“Is that what you want? Having your soul eaten by ancient magic, being responsible for the deaths of thousands of people? Casters, Normals…”

“Of course not.”

Melina smiled. “Then let’s get started.”

Kate sat, legs
crossed, inside the circle stones. Melina rested on a floor cushion a few feet outside the circle. A stack of books, some older than Kate thought possible, lay beside her. The hum from the activated circle stones set Kate’s teeth on edge.

After the examination, Melina had taken a break long enough to set the Sanctum up with the supplies she needed. Kate took the time to think. What Melina had told her was plausible. Too plausible. It tasted just true enough that Kate looked hard for the inevitable lie within.

All Kate had to go on was Grayson’s teachings, what Dylan had told her, and instinct. All three said that the dark, hungry ocean inside her was indeed some kind of link with primal magic. Just as the spells she’d cast were that ancient form of death magic. More difficult to figure out was Melina’s story that primal magic wanted to possess her and use her as a gateway. She felt primal magic’s hunger every time she touched it, but Melina’s explanation sounded a bit too self-serving. Make Kate afraid of primal magic, and she’d never learn to use it against Melina.

And then there was the stone. Its call to touch it didn’t feel like destruction. It felt like completion.

Five containers sat inside the circle around Kate. A glass aquarium contained some plants and insects: ants, beetles, butterflies, and the largest cockroach she had ever seen, all buzzing with frantic activity. A second aquarium held a few lizards, tongues darting out to taste the air, and a large snake coiled in the sand. Rodents—a few mice, rats, a rabbit, and a guinea pig—scratched at the glass of another, their claws leaving long, thin marks. Inside a wire cage, a flock of small yellow birds chattered and swooped. A much larger cage held a beagle, a small piglet, and a feral cat. The beagle whined, a high, panicked sound. The piglet squealed a breathy oink and kicked it hooves against the reinforced glass of the terrarium. The cat huddled in a corner.

Kate reached inside the last cage and stroked the beagle’s head. “Is this really necessary?”

Melina glanced up from her book. “Before I can change what the stone did, I have to understand it. Test the limits of what you can do.”

Maybe. Or maybe she has another reason for this “testing.”

“How am I supposed to cast with these things on?” Kate held up her hands, still encased in the silver spellcuffs.

“Don’t worry. I’ll free you long enough to cast each spell.” A small smile lifted the corner of her mouth. “I’ve set up the circle to prevent you from teleporting out—or doing anything other than what I specifically ask you to do.”

Kate remembered what had happened when she’d touched the screen the circle had thrown around her back at her Sanctum. Melina’s countermeasures wouldn’t be as relatively gentle as Victor’s. “What if I don’t do what you want?”

“You could say no. After all, I can’t make you. All I can do is make it very painful for you to refuse. But then again, I also didn’t have to pull you back from that dark place you went this morning, did I? Next time, I could just leave you there. And you will end up there again. Even if you don’t use the power again, it will make sure it takes you back into that darkness and never lets you back up again.”

Yeah, Melina was a Makris, just like her brother and her cousin. Melina just had a different twist to her nastiness.

That little smile had returned to Melina’s face, the smile that said,
I was born a caster, and I’m so much better than a poor little Null.
Kate wanted to slap that smile off Melina’s face.

But she couldn’t. The situation called for a different tactic.

“I… You’re right.” She slumped over and sighed, putting a little pathos into it. Her acting teachers would be proud.

Melina flipped back a page in her book, read for a moment, then set it down. She concentrated, head back, and flicked her fingers. A purple band appeared around the circle, about halfway between the floor and ceiling. The strip hovered, a steady, unwavering light.

“What is—” Kate began.

“Don’t ask questions, just do what I say. Cast a light spell, the way you were taught.”

Mouth dry, Kate nodded. Melina’s eyes fluttered, and the green stones in Kate’s spellcuffs glowed for a moment.

Kate’s hand shook a little as she traced the points out, the silver cuffs pinching her fingers. Melina better be right about freeing her from them long enough to complete the spell. She wasn’t looking forward to feeling her hands burning in a bonfire again.

Thinking back to the lesson of a few days ago, she focused on the symbol for light. She murmured the short incantation and finished tapping out the symbol on her thigh. A small ball of light appeared in the air before her, burning steadily. No paranoia—normal for casting in a Sanctum. Whatever the purpose of the purple band, it didn’t react to her spell. It hovered in the air around the circle, humming gently.

Melina scribbled a few notes in her notebook. “Now turn the spell off.”

She obeyed. The light went out as quickly as it had turned on.

“Now comes the interesting part.” Melina reached behind her. She lifted up a small red bag and reached inside, hand swathed in a piece of silk. She drew out a white bowl.

Kate’s eyes locked on the bowl. She heard a faint whisper in her mind, not the brass horn of the stone’s voice, more like a reedy piccolo. Just loud enough to set her teeth on edge. She squinted. The white material of the bowl looked just as the stone had before she’d touched it and the white had changed to black.

A primal magic artifact. It had to be.

“Do the spell again,” Melina said. “Only, use the same method you did when you tried to break our teleport block. Cast it the way you did when you burned Dmitri.”

Great. The last thing she wanted to do—dive down into that hungry blackness again.

How the hell was she going to stop primal magic from pulling her in? No idea. But she’d better figure it out if she wanted to master the darkness and get the hell away from Melina.

She let her eyes go into soft focus, as she did when engaging her magesight. She inhaled. Then she walked down the steep steps and into the basement of her mind, opened the doors once again, and looked out at the ocean of blackness that confronted her.

The waves of ebony energy lapped at her feet as she searched its dark waters, looking for some clue that would let her understand the magic’s intention. Nothing. She raised her eyes above the horizon and beheld the dark clouds, heavy with power. Torrents of jet-black-colored force streamed down like a rain of darkness as it struck the sea below, replenishing its black vitality.

The waters inched closer to her feet. The darkness pulled at her, tried to drag her into its tarry depths. Her stomach tightened.

Light
, she willed. The dark force responded right away, reaching out beyond her and making something happen. She felt something else, as well—primal magic making a choice.
This
for
that
.

The darkness surrounding her brightened, a glow on the horizon. The light shone dimly, like a lamp seen through a veil.
Must be the light spell in the Sanctum.
She sharpened her focus on the light, and her contact with the force inside her fell away. She became aware of the Sanctum around her again, that she was still sitting in the circle stones, Melina sitting outside. The animals in the circle with her screeched in terror, the beagle howling, the rodents throwing themselves at the cage walls in a panic. A new ball of light floated in front of her, looking no different than her previous casting.

Inside the aquarium, a large beetle dropped from the glass wall onto the sand. A flicker of purple shone along the border of the circle.

The bowl sitting in front of Melina had changed from white to black.

Melina got to her feet and paced around the circle, peering in at the cages.

“That was different, wasn’t it?” Kate said.

“Did you concentrate on the symbol? I didn’t see you trace it or hear you chant.”

“No.” She thought about what she had done, how she had contacted primal magic inside her. Its subtle threat to consume her until she cast the light spell. How could she explain how that felt? Words were inadequate. “It was different. I just willed it into being.”

Melina didn’t look all caster-haughty anymore as she stared intently at Kate. Instead, the gleam in Melina’s eyes reminded Kate of the look one of her classmates had given her once when she came to school with a new designer handbag.

A look that said,
I want that, and I don’t care what I have to do to get it.

“What did I do? It’s not regular casting.”

“No, it doesn’t seem to be. Let’s see what another spell will do.”

Melina wrapped the bowl back up and placed it behind her.

Bitch. She’s doing something with that bowl, something she’s not likely to tell me about. And she knows I’m a primal magic caster. The spell uses death as its price, not paranoia. And from what Dylan said, that’s primal magic. Forbidden, death magic.

She rubbed the metal of her spellcuffs and thought about the alien power’s cool regard when she cast the light spell.
This
for
that
.

“I…don’t want to,” she said.

“You don’t
want
to? If you ignore this it won’t go away. You’ll use it, and when you do you won’t know how to control it. Is that what you want? Do you want the darkness to take you over?”

She gulped down her fear. “What do you want me to do?”

“We’ll try a bigger spell, something that requires a larger sacrifice.” Melina paced in front of her. “Try a shield.”

She didn’t want to touch the void inside again. But what did Dad always say?
If you don’t control the situation, the situation controls you.

She focused and again dived into the blackness. First order of business—maintaining contact with the power inside her while still seeing her outside environment. She couldn’t deal with Melina if she couldn’t see her.

The principle must’ve been the same as with magesight. Like Grayson had said,
Maintain a soft, easy focus on your inner world, then let the outside world leak in through your peripheral senses.

She tried it, watching the dark sea before her, eyes relaxed, then pictured the Sanctum around her, separated from her inner world by an imaginary white veil. Bit by bit, the outside world appeared just beyond the veil. First Melina, then the animals in their cages, the circle stones, and the rest of the Sanctum.

It worked. Hallelujah.

Before the force inside her could do more than lap its waves against her feet, she acted.

Shield
, she willed.

The spell popped into being around her much quicker than a normal shield spell would form. Then the power went out and chose. A squeak started up, then broke off suddenly. A mouse.

Poor thing.

The purple band flickered again. Melina peered into the cages, frowning, then scribbled in her notebook.

They tested every spell Kate had been taught. Each time the purple band flickered. Each time something in the cages died: a mouse, some fish, a trail of ants, a rabbit. As each animal died, the others became more frantic. What made the magic pick three mice one time and a flock of canaries the next? Kate had no idea.

But she thought Melina did. She wrote in her book after each spell, pacing in front of the circle stones. Her steps grew shorter, her strides faster. But Kate grew more tired. Tired and worried.

She didn’t know what hidden consequence there might be to using so much primal magic. Every time she went down into that black well, did she lose a little bit of her own light? She had no way of knowing. But the hunger from the primal magic felt real. As real as her own dread.

Melina didn’t heed Kate’s pleas to stop. To eat something, get some sleep. Each spell needed to be measured, each sacrifice had to be noted. Finally there were only three animals left inside the circle with Kate. A mouse, rummaging around the floor of its cage, whiskers twitching; a king snake lying coiled in the corner of an aquarium; and the dog.

“I can’t do this anymore. What if the spell I do is too powerful, and the magic doesn’t want any of the animals?”
What if it wants me instead?

Melina tossed her hair back. Beads of sweat ran down her face. “Don’t worry about that. Just try the stun spell.”

That spell had killed all of the beetles on the riverbank in Africa when she’d used it on Dmitri. There were no beetles left to kill here. If the magic didn’t consider the animals that were left a fair trade for hundreds of beetles, what would it do?

“We’ve done enough. Turn off the circle and let me out.”

“Oh, we’re not close to being done.”

“I can’t do this all day. There’s not paranoia backlash, but it’s…draining.”

“How? Tell me.”

All this note-taking… It didn’t make sense if Melina was telling the truth. If the stone was trying to possess her, and all Melina wanted to do was sever its connection to her, why did Melina want to know how her power worked?