Better 'Ink Twice Page 15

  Nicholas stood in the center of the room, clutching Margret’s urn to his chest as he watched everyone around him erupt into chaos. Except his uncle. Winslow rose from his seat and smoothed the folds of his black robes. He stepped around the pew and the one henchman prone on the floor before skirting around me to stand toe to toe with Nicholas. He grabbed the urn in an attempt to rip it away from his nephew but Nicholas refused to let go.

  With a hard tug, he pulled his uncle close; Margret’s ashes in a porcelain jar the only thing that separated them. “You are going to pay for what you’ve done, Uncle.”

  The soft green glow emanating from Nicholas’s hands reflected off the urn’s shiny surface onto the floor. The council and their guards, along with the members of the Magistrate filling the chambers, were bewitched by Nicholas’s display of magic.

  The rest of us knew better.

  That glorious green light was as lethal as it was beautiful. I looked over at Lars and Amber, jerking my head toward Nicholas. They nodded in unison. We’d seen this show before. Not wanting to be caught in the crossfire, they scooched back as far as they could without attracting attention to themselves.

  The urn shattered. A cloud of ash enveloped them, obstructing my view but it did nothing to block out the sounds of Winslow’s screams. “Get her off, get her off me.”

  Nicholas stepped out of the ash cloud. He said something too soft for me to hear and with his back turned, I couldn’t read his lips. But it didn’t take long to figure it out. Arcane magic was inherited not taught. Whatever spell Nicholas cast was death magic and definitely not something he picked up along the way. It was a bi-product of the unraveling. Inherent knowledge locked away until I unbound him. Nicholas was beautiful, powerful, and terrifying. Was this how Dr. Frankenstein felt? An addictive rush of awe and fear? Had I in fact destroyed Nicholas by trying to save him? Did I create a monster?

  The ashes took shape. Shards of bone protruded from the three dimensional being forming before our eyes. The body was disfigured with hollow spots where the particles needed to complete the form were missing. Some members of the Magistrate covered their eyes or turned their heads but I refused to look away.

  I witnessed her death. I would witness her horrific resurrection.

  Winslow broke into hysterics. Arms raised in a defensive posture, he blubbered on about the two fools he’d sent to do his dirty work. “They weren’t supposed to kill you,” he pleaded with Margret’s remains before switching targets and addressing his nephew. “I only wanted to free you. Don’t you see? They did this to you. People like her. Filthy warders changing the order of things with their forbidden magic. They’re the real abominations. Not witches like you, Nicholas. If she had just helped me, helped you from the very beginning, none of this would have happened.”

  “The only person you’ve ever helped has been yourself, Uncle. You helped yourself to my father’s work, his property, and my mother’s inheritance after his death. A death you orchestrated. Somewhere along the line, after your plans for Karen Brown failed and she killed herself rather than be your slave, you discovered my father’s greatest accomplishment and deepest secret— me.” Nicholas looked down at his hands and the magic pulsating from them. “And you thought you’d help yourself to that, too.”

  Margret’s mangled corpse jerked into motion. Charred skin and bone fell from her arm as she raised it to point an accusing finger at her Winslow. “Murderer,” she rasped.

  Nicholas was one hell of a multitasker. He controlled the dead while attacking the living. Most days, I could barely chew gum and walk. “You should have done your homework on Adeline. I did. You were so convinced destroying everything she ever loved would bend her to your will. You’d have Karen Brown in your clutches and toss the warder in a lead cell when you were done with her. But I knew better. I knew she could help me bring all your dark deeds to light. There’s a trail of bodies: my father, Grim, Karen Brown, Margret and they all lead to you. And for what, more power, more money?” Nicholas curled his fingers inward, like claws, and Margret’s dead body kicked into motion.

  Her animated corpse creaked and cracked as she stumbled toward Winslow. He shouted his innocence in the deaths of Vincent Marks and Grim as she clutched his lapel with bony fingers blackened from the fire of her cremation. “Murderer,” she hissed, expelling a fine layer of ash that coated Winslow’s face when she spoke.

  Winslow continued to claim his innocence in the deaths of our families but said nothing of his hand in the deaths of Karen or Margret.

  “Enough.” The Crone rose from her seat on the dais. She stepped off the platform and closed the distance between her and the spectacle unfolding in the middle of the room. “We have heard enough.” With the snap of a finger, she stripped away Winslow’s voice.

  Of course, that didn’t stop his mouth from moving. Even then, caught red-handed in front of the Council, he couldn’t take responsibility for what he’d done.

  The Mother and Maiden joined their counterpart in the center of the room. The corporeal representation of our goddess spoke in unison with the authority of their divine right. “Winslow, you stand charged with the crimes of murder, false imprisonment, treason, and Goddess knows what else. But rest assured, we will root it out and all those with you. You are henceforth stripped of all appointments and are reprimanded to the custody of the Council where you will await trial in one of our cells. I believe you’re familiar with them. Perhaps the one used to hold your nephew?”

  Representatives rushed to retake their seats in the pews as the three witches took control of the situation and the room returned to some semblance of order. Two Magistrate guards stood on either of side of Winslow and slapped a pair of lead cuffs on his wrists. The guards hauled him to his feet and dragged him toward the side entrance but Winslow wasn’t finished with his nephew. Before the lead cuffs leached the last of his magic, a slew of curses flew from his mouth.

  The last one hit its mark.

  If Winslow couldn’t control Nicholas and the magic he possessed, no one could. Nicholas clutched his chest and fell to his knees. Winslow used the people in his employ with the Magistrate at his disposal; always careful to keep his hands clean. Exposed in front of his peers and the Council, he had nothing left to lose. He stood accused of three murders, what was one more?

  Still pinned to the floor, I writhed beneath the guard until he shifted his weight and let me up. I rushed to Nicholas’s side. Not that it mattered. Despite centuries of Magistrate propaganda, warders never dealt in black magic. I didn’t know the counter curse and it seemed none of the other people in the room did, either.

  Or worse, they chose to do nothing.

  Unbound and untrained, Nicholas posed a threat to the community at large. If the greater authority assembled in the room chose to let a former graduate and member of a wealthy, connected family die rather than train him, that didn’t bode well for Lars, Amber, or me. But the cells beneath the campus grounds wasn’t what I feared the most.

  It was losing Nicholas.

  He came into my life under false pretenses, irritated me right from the start but had proven himself time and again. He saved my ass more than once, put up with my ceaseless complaints about being holed up in his apartment, and forgave me for my part in the betrayal that landed him in a lead cell. Our magic may have been different but we were the same. I did my best to ignore my feelings for him even as they deepened through each disaster but I couldn’t any longer.

  He was dying and my heart was breaking.

  I gripped his face between both hands and leaned in until the tips of our noses touched. “I’m going to save you.” I pressed my lips to his with a childish hope that the fairytales were real and true love’s kiss would save him. His cold, clammy skin and ashen complexion proved otherwise.

  I didn’t have my machine or any inks; no tools of my trade to facilitate my magic. Herbs and salves weren’t my area of expertise, not that there were any laying around. Or were there?

 
“Amber,” I cried out. My heart raced and throat tightened as I held back the sobs struggling to break free.

  Amber shrugged off the guard whose grip loosened once Winslow was in cuffs. She rushed over and knelt down beside us. “I’ve never heard that curse before, Del. This is all I have left.” She pulled a small sachet of white tulle packed with dried herbs and tied off with yellow ribbon. “I... I don’t know if this will work.” She pried Nicholas’s fingers back from his tightly clenched fist and closed them back around the sachet. Amber’s version of a gris gris bag slowed the curse but couldn’t break it.

  I feared the only one who could was the same vile bastard who cast it.

  Winslow craned his neck to look over his shoulder, upper lip curled back in a sneer, as he watched his nephew slip away while being dragged out of the chambers. His confidence wavered when the main doors opened and a woman who bore a strong resemblance stormed into the room. A look of fear flashed across his face. Winslow was quick to set his mask of defiance back in place but a slight twitch at the corner of his left eye gave him away.

  Winslow was afraid of his sister.

  A fear that was not unwarranted. He killed her husband, syphoned off her fortune, and her son lay dying at her feet. Her brother took everything from her and it was high time she returned the favor. Unadulterated rage simmered in her eyes. I recognized that look. It was reflected back at me every time I looked in the mirror for the first year after Grim died. Winslow kept Veronica under thumb. She had to have seen things, learned things that would be of interest to the Council. His sister would be the nail in his coffin.

  “A Winslow family curse.” Veronica looked at her son, a pained expression on her face. “One of many, I’m afraid.”

  She pulled out an old porcelain pillbox from the pocket of her designer pants and knelt down next to her son. She opened the small box and took out two brown-speckled capsules before prying open Nicholas’s mouth and forcing them inside. She reached into her other pocket and pulled out a blade the size of my thumb, sliced into her index finger, and used her blood to draw sigils on her son’s forehead, cheeks, and throat.

  Nicholas’s color and breathing returned to normal. His eyes flickered open. “Del.” A weak smile formed on his face when he saw me hovering above him. Still under the effects of the curse while the antidote worked its magic, his eyelids drooped down and sleep claimed him again.

  “I must speak with the Council about their plans for the four of you. Keep your hands and your magic off my son. You’ve done enough damage, Warder.” Veronica brushed off her pants and fixed the crease as she stood; the point of her expensive high heeled shoe just missed my fingers. She looked down at me over her nose, like the social outcast that I was. “And you might want to say your goodbyes. This is the last you’ll be seeing of Nicholas.”

  If looks could kill, the one Veronica gave me would have had me lying prone next to her son. She stepped around Nicholas and met the three council members, who had been keen to let her son die, in front of the dais.

  Veronica Winslow may as well have put my heart in a vice grip but I had no doubt she’d keep her word. Still, Nicholas was alive and that was enough. I could learn to live without him as long as he lived. I stole a kiss while Veronica’s back was turned and whispered unfulfilled promises of my affections along with my goodbye into his ear before letting Amber pull me to my feet. She looped an arm around my waist and steered me toward Lars and the three guards who boxed him in.

  We beat Winslow at his own game. He was under lock and key in a lead cell and we were still alive. At least, for the time being. The Council arrested one criminal but according to their own laws, four more remained in the chambers. Veronica was busy negotiating on behalf of her son who according to her was the victim of kidnapping and unwillingly under the influence of banned magics by a known practitioner with an outstanding warrant for warding. I think she was referring to me. Meanwhile, Lars, Amber, and I huddled together and awaited our fate.

  I prayed it wasn’t a fate worse than death.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Maiden, Mother, and Crone resumed their place on the dais as an emergency legislative session was called to order. A different type of chaos erupted in the room in the form of a raucous debate to decide our fate. Nicholas had been swept away by his mother and two representatives from Alchemy, a left-leaning faction of the Magistrate. Their counterpart, the Arcanes, lovingly referred to as the archaics by those of us who disagree with their medieval world views of a pure society, held the floor and the fate of the three of us without fortune and family ties.

  It took less time than I expected for the deep-seated hate within the Magistrate to rise to the surface.

  “Abominations,” a man with wireframe glasses and greasy combover shouted from the back pew. “Are we going to allow a practitioner of death magic to simply walk out of here, right into the hands of the family that orchestrated this disaster to begin with?”

  More details of Winslow’s greedy schemes and power plays came to light as two of his lackeys were interrogated under pain of lead— a horrid method of extracting a confession involving force-feeding lead fishing weights I hoped to never witness again.

  “And what of them?” a craggily witch in the front row asked with a crooked finger pointed in our direction. She was old and mean enough to have been the inspiration for the brothers Grim. The patchy hair and grayed complexion were dead giveaways her life had been extended by the use of elixirs. “Are we going to let a warder walk out of here? To continue practicing her trade and helping those miscreants hide their mutations?”

  After twenty minutes of back and forth about how undesirable Nicholas and I were, I raised my hand and injected myself into the one-sided debate. “As riveting as this all is, can we fast forward to the part where our sentence is handed out.”

  Amber’s eyes widened to the point I feared they might fall out of her head. “What the hell is the matter with you?” She elbowed Lars in the ribs when he failed to hide his laughter behind a coughing fit.

  “Maybe this is the punishment?” Lars chided. “It definitely falls under cruel and unusual.”

  Amber looked appalled. While there was no love lost for the Magistrate, she’d never been on the wrong side of the law before. As Margret’s niece, she would have been spared the tithe and growing restrictions the rest of us lived with.

  “Are we boring you, Warder?” The Maiden’s mouth upturned in a lopsided smile; a twinkle of mischief in her eye but I couldn’t tell if that was a good or bad.

  I was leaning toward bad.

  It wouldn’t be the first time my mouth cashed a check my ass couldn’t clear but the venom spewed by the members of the Arcane party made the lead cells beneath our feet sound like a welcome reprieve. I had half a mind to march myself down there and slam the cell door shut. At least it was quiet— apart from all the moaning and crying from neighboring cells.

  “Well then,” the Maiden snapped her fingers and two guards appeared at her side. “Let’s get you all settled into your new accommodations, shall we?”

  The guards bowed at the hip before walking toward us. One still bore the physical marks of her run-in with us in the cells when we broke Nicholas out. She gripped the hilt of the athame holstered at her waist and flashed a menacing smile that emphasized the shiner on her left eye. She grabbed Amber with more force than necessary for someone who wasn’t resisting and instructed her partner to check my hands.

  “Don’t let her mark you.” She jerked her head toward the spot where I dropped one of their teammates.

  Amber wept as she was hauled away. A third guard came to take Lars, who struggled against his restraints in an attempt to console Amber. My jailer, somewhere in his forties if I had to guess, pulled a flask from inside the jacket of his dress uniform and doused my hands with salt water. A quick and dirty way to ensure I wouldn’t mark him on the way to the cells.

  Like countless witches before me, I took the first of my last steps
outside of a lead-lined box.

  The Council was not without a sense of irony. My new accommodations weren’t new at all. I helped Nicholas escape this same cell. I paced back and forth, left to right, like tigers in a zoo— at least they had fresh air and sunlight. The high concentration of lead took its toll in a matter of minutes; leaching magic from my body— an excruciating experience comparable to someone sucking the marrow from your bones. A wave of nausea and dizziness washed over me with the force of a tsunami. My knees hit the floor before I realized I was falling. I threw up. And then I threw up again. The heaving continued until my stomach was well past empty and I passed out.

  Pain reactors in the nerve endings throughout my face sounded the alarm in my brain and roused me from unconsciousness. Dry heaving and vertigo would have kept me on the floor if not for the burning sensation that now extended the full length of my left side. I forced myself to stand, locking my knees so I didn’t fall down again. With a trembling hand, I touched the side of my face, sucking in a breath between my teeth as the burning pain intensified. The blistered skin seeped where I touched it. Without the proper salves, I’d bear the scars of my imprisonment like a red letter.

  Not that anyone would see them— or me, for that matter.

  I dragged myself to the small cot pushed up against the back wall and collapsed with my feet dangling over the end. Through my clothes, the lead-woven blankets itched and irritated my skin like a minor sunburn. Still, it was better than the floor. Something scratched into the wall caught my eye and I rolled to my side for a closer look. Etched into the layer of concrete coating of the lead cell was the alchemist’s symbol.

  Oh, Nicholas. How did you survive for weeks in here?

  If there was one silver lining, he was it. Nicholas was free of Winslow and safe in the care of his mother until he learned to control the death magic. I failed Karen Brown, but with Nicholas... I upheld my end of the deal. It didn’t quite work out as I planned, considering I planned on stopping Winslow and maintaining the status quo, but I threw in with the Goddess and she doesn’t make promises.