A Final Touch: The Complete Series, page 66
“If I die,” she repeated, angry at the interruption, “it’s my choice. I’m not going to be one of those practitioners who sits around and waits for someone else to save them.”
“Because there’s nobody left?”
“Nobody left? What about you?”
“No one has any freaking idea what I practice, let alone what I can ultimately do.” I didn’t mean for my voice to dip so low, nor did I want to time it with a gust of unholy cold wind that splattered rain over my front. I still did.
Underneath my disguise, I was wearing hospital scrubs. The cold, wet wind chilled me to my bones, but I tried not to shiver as we made it toward the flood tunnels.
Weirdly, they weren’t being guarded. I guess right now, considering the cathedral and hospital had been attacked, it was a low target. Or maybe it was being surveilled from further inside.
I stopped and looked at Kelsey. The good thing about wearing a disguise was that I could strap my dagger around my hips, didn’t even need to tuck it underneath my tunic top. Kelsey’s eyes darted down to it now. “You’re gonna need to be quick with that. You do know how to use a dagger, don’t you?”
I had to snort. “The last couple of tumultuous hours have taught me quite well.”
She gripped my shoulder and stared right into my eyes. “Well, I sure hope your skills are up to scratch. So let’s go into the belly of the beast.”
No more words. What did I need her to say? That this was crazy, dangerous, and statistically, we’d both die?
I darted my head around and stared at the skyline of Mythos City. Was I looking for help? It wouldn’t come.
I still got the oddest impression that something or someone was watching me. It happened the last time I’d paused in front of the flood tunnels, too. Whatever it was, it couldn’t want to stop me that much, because it didn’t swoop down for the kill.
Yet.
We walked inside.
The first thing that struck me was the scent of disturbed dirt and fire. I had gone to town on the flood tunnels only… 24 hours ago? Nope. 12 hours ago? God, I now had no concept of time.
I wasn’t the only one who remembered our last outing, though. Kelsey soon bared her teeth. “When I get my hands on the wolves who kidnapped me, I’m gonna show them some old-fashioned Mythos Pack hospitality.”
“I’m pretty sure most of them are gone anyway.”
“I doubt it. A lot of them would’ve survived. And by the sounds of it, they would’ve joined another King.”
“Or been sold,” I whispered, my voice descending with a shake.
I was about to descend into the King’s world, finally ready to see it with my own damn eyes. Maybe it would look a lot like Patrick and the Wizard Kings’ places. I got the distinct impression it would be bigger, badder, and far more terrifying. Though I usually kept a handle on my fear, now it gripped my chest.
We couldn’t conceivably walk all the way into the middle of the flood tunnels. It was irritating that you couldn’t take your car down here. But I had to remember the Wizard King had possessed plenty of fancy SUVs. Maybe some of them hadn’t been destroyed in the attack?
I kept sniffing the air, trying to get the mechanical sense of a car. But it was pretty hard. Cars don’t really have a strong smell.
Kelsey joined me, and together, we soon sniffed something out. We veered vaguely close to where the Wizard King’s wolf headquarters had been, but then headed in the opposite direction.
Kelsey was at the helm. How could she walk so confidently? Her body must be teetering on the edge of complete and total collapse. But the wolf was true to her word. She would decide when and how she’d go. She finally lifted her hand. “I’ve got something. This way.” She tried to push into a run but immediately stopped, grabbed her ribs, and wheezed.
“Kelsey,” I snapped.
She lifted her hand quickly. “I’m fine. Or as fine as somebody can be while they’re coming down from those God-awful drugs.” She stopped and placed her hand on the back of her head. Then she closed her eyes.
“What does it feel like, anyway?” I asked quietly.
Turning around, she arched an eyebrow. “Like losing your mind.”
“I mean the actual drugs.” I couldn’t stop thinking of that vampire at the Wizard King’s store. “When you first take it, what does it actually feel like?”
The obvious answer was painful. But I wanted a more nuanced response, because my mind kept ticking back to the fact that they were oddly opposed to my own magic. They couldn’t come from the same place, right? Or at least the same research?
That was a crazy thought. That vamp was certain I was ancient. What if I wasn’t and Kelsey was wrong? I could also be an M-day experiment. But I knew I was clutching at straws. I could never get that ancient vamp’s response out of my brain.
Kelsey took several quiet seconds to respond, then opened her lips. “It feels like you’re losing your soul, like it’s being ripped right out of your mouth.”
I shuddered. “That sounds horrible. But… what does it do to your magic?”
She scratched slowly at her arm. “That’s the worst. It’s like it grabs it and tries to rip it out of you. But at the last moment, it strangles more force from you instead. Your magic, that once helped you, turns into this beast within that you can’t control. It’s horrendous.”
It was my turn to reach out and place a hand on Kelsey’s shoulder. I had no words to console her. How about actions, instead? “I’m going to find it all, I’m gonna destroy it, then I’m gonna—”
“Take the Kings’ power, one by one. Can I watch?” she asked in a much lighter tone.
It forced a grin to whip over my lips. “I’ll get you front-row seats.”
It was braggadocio. Who knew if we’d even reached the Kings, but at least we got to a car. Kelsey streamed ahead, sniffing the air – then we turned a corner to a thankfully whole section of the flood tunnels. This area didn’t even have any cracks. But it did have a compound behind a metal fence. And there were three lined up black SUVs.
Kelsey went to jump in but soon realized she didn’t have the strength. So I walked right up to the fence, yanked my dagger out, and sliced it down. It was appropriately like a knife going through butter – the truly melted, entirely soft stuff that can’t resist a thing. I cut a huge hole out of the fence, meaning we could drive the SUV right out of it. Then I stopped when I realized we didn’t have keys.
Fortunately, Kelsey had a diverse skill set. She walked over to the driver’s side, grabbed the handle, then started to work her fingers back and forth.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Trying to get away with using as little magic as possible. I don’t want to accidentally activate the immobilizer. Got it,” she snapped. The door opened.
She went to jump into the driver’s seat, but I arched an eyebrow. “Are you really capable of driving right now?”
She grinned at me. “Capable? That’s possibly a technical no. Do I want to? I wanna reach the Kings ASAP. You getting in?”
I frowned at her, judging her condition, then realized if she’d gotten this far, she could probably drive us through the flood tunnels. It wasn’t like there’d be much traffic. It would also leave my senses open to track what was happening. I didn’t want to claim I had a better sense of smell than Kelsey, but if I focused on Jace… who knew?
I jumped into the passenger seat, my stomach forming a knot. Turns out, focusing on Jace wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. My mind kept on looping back to that kiss. It’d felt so freaking sudden at the time…. Yet simultaneously, it felt like the culmination of 1000 years of waiting.
I sucked at relationships. Quite clearly, considering the fact I’d hidden from everything for most of my adult life.
There was no point hiding with Jace. I swear he always knew what I was thinking.
It was easy to say he was always a step ahead of me, but fortunately for us right now, he wasn’t. Virginia could have him, as bad as it sounded, as long as she kept him distracted.
Kelsey soon started driving. She clearly knew her way through the flood tunnels. There was no question. She headed down the right intersections, and I knew from the smell we were traveling deeper.
“Do you know every single route in the city or something?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” she announced, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. “Part of the job.”
“Speaking of which,” I grabbed the handhold and frowned through the darkened windscreen, “Jace said that crime started heating up in the city about a year and a half ago.”
“Yep,” she hissed, pursing her lips in a dangerous snarl. “I can remember it. To the exact day. The week before was calm. The week after… murders shot through the roof, disappearances too. Heck, someone even dug up three rows of dead folks in the main cemetery.”
My eyes immediately sliced over to her, my blood pressure rising like a thunderclap. “Three full rows? How many people is that?”
Her nose scrunched as she tried to remember. “24. Something like that. They didn’t stop there. They kept digging up corpses. We locked down the main cemetery, but people are buried everywhere in magical cities. Especially out in the woods. If the random holes in the national parks are anything to go by, plenty more got dug up. Back before there were laws governing this, witches used to prefer to bury their kin in the woods in unmarked graves.”
I couldn’t stop blinking. “Give me an estimate. How many missing bodies do you think there were?”
She pursed her lips together and whistled. “No clue. It would be well over several hundred.”
My fingers scrunched harder around the handhold. “That’s a lot of corpses to experiment on.”
It was her turn to frown. “Experiment on? Wizards probably took them. And they wouldn’t be experimenting on the corpses. They’d be using their bones in spells.”
“… Or maybe they were trying to reanimate them?”
She turned around and stared at me, expression blank. “You can’t reanimate the dead. Everybody knows that. Magic is amazing but—”
“Hey Kelsey, do you know what I am?” It was a rhetorical question.
The wolf soon got my drift. But she shook her head with a tight move. “You cannot reanimate people.”
“Then who the hell is Barnaby?”
“He could be a clone.”
“He was incredibly powerful.”
“You cut through his force—”
“Because I used a skill he didn’t know I had. I surprised him. And he wanted me. If he’d wanted me dead, I’d be splattered over the walls instead.”
Kelsey didn’t fight me as much as Jace did. In his mind, it clearly wasn’t a possibility that the Kings were somehow reanimated. But my brain kept ticking back to Patrick. “Did you see the old Alpha die?”
“No. But I know plenty of people who did.”
“So he definitely died?”
Her nostrils rattled. “I might not have seen his death. I saw his corpse. Even touched it and smelled it. He was definitely dead.”
“Was he buried in his crypt pretty fast?”
“Yep.”
“Did people do a vigil?”
“At the gates, sure.”
“So somebody could’ve gone and picked up his corpse pretty fast, then. And no one would’ve noticed.”
“You flat-out can’t reanimate people. It’s not possible. The body dies, and the mind goes with it.”
“I can remove magic with a single freaking touch. Does that make any sense to you? Do you have any idea what kind of mechanism I use to do that?”
She bared her teeth. Then her shoulders crumpled. “No, but that doesn’t mean people are freaking rising from the dead.”
“I don’t know anything about biochemistry – do you?”
“A tiny bit.”
“Does the concept of a magic accelerant make any sense to you?”
Her mouth opened. But her lips slowly scrunched in. Kelsey had firsthand experience with the drug. I might have peppered her with questions, but she’d given me an imperfect response. Yet she must’ve felt the magic accelerant taking hold.
She paused several seconds before she answered, “Not really. It should be impossible. Magic isn’t produced by the cells. They channel it. While you could have a more efficient channeling system, it doesn’t feel like that. It’s like you’re struck with a wall of pure magic that comes from somewhere.”
“Say you injected pure magical accelerant into a corpse. What do you think would happen?”
She shrugged, ready to say nothing. But I saw the flicker in her eye as my question intrigued her.
Grabbing hold of my seat belt, I leaned forward and looked right into her eyes. “Say you were an incredibly powerful individual in life. And say you were buried correctly, quickly, in a powerful crypt. Most of them have a preserving effect. Right? Patrick’s crypt definitely did. I felt it when he threw me in there. He used it to heal me.”
“Most magical crypts have a kind of stasis effect. It’s not technically healing—”
“Well, it sure helped me. He might have thrown some potions in there with me. The point was, that crypt would’ve preserved his body, right?”
She really didn’t like where this was going. But she hissed a quick, “Yes.”
“Barnaby would’ve probably been buried in the same way. It might have been 100 years ago, but he was a seriously powerful head of Mythos at the time.”
Her shoulders shook even lower. “Yeah. I happen to know this one. He was buried in the exact kind of crypt as Patrick was. They seal the body in a hermetic environment, stopping bacteria from digesting it. It’s kind of like a mummification process, I guess. Way more sophisticated than what the Egyptians did.”
“So say you inject a perfect corpse with a high dose of magical accelerant. What do you think’s going to happen?”
She hated this Socratic line of questioning and banged her head repeatedly against the headrest. “Nothing. Because they’re dead.”
“Unless there’s something else. Some other third drug we don’t know anything about. One they only used on the right kind of candidate. Something that helps that old magic rise.”
“The brain would be dead. No brain, no memories.”
“Patrick definitely remembers who he is.”
“How would you know? You never met him in life.”
My mouth opened then closed. That was an assumption, true. But Patrick was hellbent on getting his pack back.
… Was it a memory or an urge?
God, I’d encountered another question. It hammered on my brain, poking it full of more freaking holes.
I’d mentioned my headache. Now it got worse, hammering between my temples like Thor trying to crack through the sky.
At least I’d gotten Kelsey thinking. Dragging a hand off the wheel, she tapped her chin multiple times. “This is crazy. I still refuse to believe reanimation is possible.”
“Of any ordinary person, I imagine it isn’t. Of incredibly powerful practitioners whose corpses were preserved the right way – I’m starting to think it is.”
“Where are you going with this?” she asked softly.
“What if the Kings aren’t random strong practitioners? What if they’re all,” my voice dropped into a tight whisper, “old heads from the past?”
I watched Kelsey’s skin turn cold. It was so obvious, she paled several shades. It took several more seconds for her to shake her head hard. She didn’t look like she was disagreeing, just trying to free herself of this possibility. “If that’s the truth,” she could barely push that out of tight lips, “then we’re all screwed. Some of the heads of the past, before M-Day especially, were insanely strong. They didn’t have to hide from the public. They didn’t spend most of their time trying to look the part. And they didn’t have human laws to constrain them. They practiced what they wanted when they wanted from the day they were freaking born. There’s a witch from two centuries ago, Madam Helsey,” she shuddered again, “who could apparently phase through freaking matter.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s a special kind of nature spell. It’s where you convince material, say, dirt, to move out of your way. It does so willingly, essentially allowing you to walk through whatever you want. I’m not convinced it would work on some modern building materials, but who knows.”
“Great. I’m gonna assume that she’s the King of the Witches.”
“You go ahead and do that. But if she is, you are screwed.”
“What about the King of the Engelos?” I asked, my voice dissenting with a horrid snap.
Kelsey clearly didn’t even want to think of this one. “Engelos have always been a seriously secretive bunch. And far more powerful than most other races. They had the distinct advantage of not technically practicing magic. Some people think they are pure magic.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
She had to snort. “It makes more sense than your pet theory. Oh, what am I saying? I’m already starting to believe this. And do you know how terrifying that is? What if we actually walk down into the King’s world and find they’re all old heads?”
“Then we have a way to get to them. And a way to stop them.”
“Huh?”
“How many of the old heads are buried right here in Mythos City?”
“All of them. It’s a tradition. If you serve the city, then the city serves your soul after your death.”
“So we go, and we find the old heads. Then we dig them up,” I said, giving a shiver, “and we keep them away from the Kings. They’d be backups, anyway.”
“Maybe. When you told me about the robing store and those wizards, you seemed to suggest they were vying for the position of King.”
“Maybe there are sub-positions. Or maybe most of your average, everyday Joes don’t understand exactly how the system works and think they have a shot at it. It would be a great way to distract them, to get them working for the Kings’ causes without them ever realizing how ultimately screwed they are.”
“Oh, I don’t want to believe any of this.” Kelsey’s head dipped forward.
Alarmed, I tried to guess her condition. It was impossible in disguise. “You good?”
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