A Spell for Twilight: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts Read online

  We passed around hugs and pecks on cheeks before we were finally able to extricate ourselves. Once we were out of the dining room and into the long hallway that led east to the wing of the house where we’d settled, Isaac gave a sigh of relief that was quickly echoed by the others. “She’s a delight,” he muttered. He glanced at me. “Sorry you had to endure all that.”

  I chuckled and hooked my arm into his. Hunter snuck up to my other side and took that arm. I grinned at both of them. “Elina is… great,” I said. “She seems like kind of a rebel. Maybe a little, um…”

  “Snobbish?” Isaac asked.

  “Immune to concepts like personal boundaries?” Nathan offered from behind.

  Lucas laughed softly. “A cougar? Did you see how she was looking at Nathan? I’m sure she’d invite you to bed if you hung around her long enough.”

  I glanced back to see Nathan rolling his eyes and giving Lucas a playful, irritated shove. I’m glad he rejected the idea, because the thought of it made my stomach tense. “She had an intellectual interest,” he insisted. “About something deeply traumatizing, but… I’m sure she wasn’t looking at me that way.”

  “He wouldn’t have noticed if she was,” Isaac murmured to me. “You should have seen the way he was around Hunter. Months, and he remained utterly oblivious. It was the same with Lucas and me. He’s constitutionally incapable of recognizing when someone’s attracted to him.”

  “I can hear you,” Nathan complained. “I’m three feet away.”

  Hunter let go of my arm to open the door from the sitting room onto the east patio. “I dare you to claim he’s wrong, though.”

  That got a chuckle from Lucas and Isaac as we walked out into the sunlight.

  Except, I crossed the threshold, and the light vanished. The air turned cold, and my stomach dropped as the world outside became gray and lifeless, the yard beyond the ruined patio was dry, jagged earth instead of lush grass and wildflowers. The sky above was filled with roiling black clouds.

  And I was alone.

  Amelia

  My first instinct was to scream. I held it off with a shaky breath, and closed my eyes. “It’s not real,” I told myself. “It’s a dream. Wake up. Just wake up, Amelia.”

  “A dream,” a voice said from nearby. “That’s one possibility, I suppose.”

  The voice was sensuous, kind, and feminine. Az-Harad. Even if it sounded different like this, I would always know her when I heard her speak from the way it made my bones seem to shiver, and some part of me perk up and listen. A part that I desperately wanted to be rid of.

  “You can’t shut me out like that, my sweet daughter,” she said, closer now. She was at my ear. Her breath was frigid, sending painful prickles of ice over my ear and down my neck. Worse than ice, even—a kind of numbness that felt like parts of me disappeared.

  I turned my head from her, opening my eyes, but refusing to look at her. Whatever she showed me wasn’t real, anyway. “Leave me alone,” I commanded. “Go away, and let me go back.”

  “You can leave anytime you like,” she crooned, and stepped around me, into view.

  She was tall, elegant but too thin, as if she hadn’t eaten in her entire existence. She wore a sheer sort of black dress made of smoke and darkness that flowed around her, moving in a wind that wasn’t blowing. Her neck was too long, her face narrow and angular. Her eyes were voids. Her thin lips curved into a smile too gentle for a creature like her to wear, and she reached up to touch my face.

  “No,” I said, stepping back. “Never touch me. Let me go, or—”

  “Or?” She shrugged one bony shoulder and her dress flared and settled. “Will you strike me down with mortal magic? If you wished to destroy me, precious one, you could. But not with that magic.”

  I brushed my right forearm, where a tattoo marked my skin. When I looked, it was visible, which proved that I wasn’t in my body. It was a failsafe Nathan and me had devised to snap me out of the Abyss. But I wasn’t in the Abyss, either—this was something different. Something new, which meant it was unpredictable. I tried anyway, calling up a trickle of magic to activate the sigil.

  From far away, something tugged at me. In the dreams, that tug took my back to myself, woke me up. But something held me here.

  Az-Harad clucked her tongue. “Not this time. Not until you’ve listened. All I want to do is speak with you, my beloved. Mother to daughter.”

  “You are not my mother,” I said. I tried the sigil again, with more magic this time, but all it accomplished was a sudden sinking sensation in my stomach, as if I was falling without moving. I couldn’t bear it for long enough to see if it would work.

  The Dreadmother cocked her head to one side, watching me. Waiting. Another instinct rose. All around me I could feel the power of the Abyss permeating the bleak hellscape. It was practically at my fingertips. That was exactly what she wanted of me, though.

  “We can wait as long as you like,” Az-Harad said. “I am eternal. There is no time here. Not anymore. You will find that my patience is truly infinite.”

  I hugged myself, staring out across the remains of the Roth estate. Could she hold me here indefinitely? I didn’t want to test it. “I already know what you want,” I muttered. “I’m not giving it to you.”

  “Are you so certain?” She wondered, and waved around at the nightmare. “Perhaps you merely haven’t discovered the proper circumstances, the right motivation. The part of you that is me may be constant, unchanging. But the other part—the flesh, the human spirit; that part of you is volatile. Prone to sudden bouts of sentimentality, fury, madness… love and lust. It is what makes you so profound.”

  “Great,” I said. “Is that what you wanted to say?”

  She strolled toward the edge of the stone patio, where a section had crumbled away. “Come with me. Walk beside me. Let me show you.”

  I tested the sigil again while she waited there. No luck. Maybe, if I tapped into the Abyss for just a moment… just long enough to escape…

  No. I closed my eyes and pushed the impulse away. Never again, I told myself. I would never take up that power again. Not after last time.

  Which only left the option to follow her. Nothing Az-Harad said or did was without some manipulative purpose, some end goal that I thought I knew. She wanted Creation. The phenomenal world of experience, time and space. She craved it for herself, for the others like her. Her children. The Hungering Offspring. As long as I remembered that—that she wanted to end everything—then it didn’t matter what she said.

  As I walked toward her, and to the edge of the broken stone, she walked on, down to the dead earth. Where her feet touched the soil, it blackened and crumbled to black sand, so that she left a black river of the powder where she trod. “There is such beauty in this place,” she said. “Such perfection. There is no chaos here, no unpredictability. Like a sculpture—it simply is this, now. Forever. Can you imagine such a thing? A work of art to span all of creation, held in perfect balance for all time?”

  “It’s dead,” I remarked. “Maybe it’s a matter of taste. I never really cared for the whole post-modernism thing.”

  “Is that what you think death is?” She asked, with surprising earnestness.

  “Nothing changing, nothing growing, no living things?” I kicked at a chunk of rock. It weighed nothing, and burst like some spore-laden mushroom, puffing into dust. “That’s about as dead as it gets.”

  Az-Harad shook her head. “No, dear one. Death is decay, it is change, absorption. Digestion. Where there is no life, there is no death. Without death, no life. And without those things, there is no pain, no suffering. No senseless violence. No disease. No hatred, no viciousness. You think I bring death? I am the mother of oblivion, of freedom—true freedom, everlasting. I can remove the yolk of the False Ones, those who feast on your souls, on your hopes and dreams, on your suffering. I can return creation to its true, pure state. That’s all I want, my darling. Not death. Never that perversion.”

  I sigh
ed. “Well, I happen to like some of that chaos. The love, the sensations, the exploration.”

  “And yet you only crave these things because you suffer,” she countered. “If you did not feel the lack, you would not need love. If you were at peace, you would not need sensation. If all knowledge was within you, you would not require exploration. All that you crave is the symptom of a disease. Let me cure you. Let me cure all of existence. You will know peace, everlasting, such as you cannot comprehend. See for yourself.”

  She went to a break in the garden, where a stone path led between dead bushes and ashen trees. I could just make out something at the other end of the path, hidden behind the spidery arms of one of the tall bushes. Whatever was there, I didn’t want to see it. But Az-Harad gestured again, and waved me on, and I knew that if I didn’t see it, I could be here, as she’d said, for eternity even if only a moment passed back where my body was.

  So I took a step onto the path, and followed it to a small clearing with what was probably a beautiful gazebo, once. The roof was vaguely onion shaped, supported by carved pillars of alabaster. The whole shape of it was octagonal, and it was wide enough to build another house inside.

  There were people in it, standing perfectly still. Dead, I thought at first, by the way their cheeks were hollow, their eyes sunken, their hair caked with dust. As if they’d died that way and stiffened immediately in place. With no wind, no subtly vibrating earth beneath them, not even the tug of the moon that was now stationary in a dead sky, nothing had tipped them over.

  Except, Az-Harad claimed there was no death in a perfect world.

  And as I moved closer, I realized that they hadn’t died. And they weren’t strangers to me, either. The tallest one had the remains of a beard on his gaunt face. Beside him, I recognized the cheeks, chin and brow of Isaac. Opposite Isaac, Nathan stared with eyes only vaguely moist, into nothing. Lucas had his back to me, but I knew the shape of his shoulders.

  They were all alive. But… not. They didn’t notice me, didn’t move or react. They hadn’t for… maybe ages, I realized. They just stood, staring into nothing. Barely breathing. That breath was the only movement in the whole world, it seemed like.

  Grief and anger twisted my stomach as I staggered back, tripping over the step down from the gazebo deck that I hadn’t realized I had climbed to, and I almost fell. Az-Harad caught me. Where her hands touched me, it seemed that I ceased to exist, as if voids of space opened up in my body. I turned and slapped her hand away. “What did you do to them?” I demanded. “You… you’re a monster. Worse than a monster… you belong in the Abyss, far away from all the things you could destroy. Whoever the ‘False Ones’ are, I’m guessing they put you there, and I’m glad they did.”

  If she’d been my real mother, she might have reacted. She might have looked hurt that I’d turned on her. That was how mothers were, right? When their children finally said they hated them in the throes of some teenage meltdown?

  Az-Harad didn’t react at all. She lowered her hand, and peered up at my boys. Or the twisted representations of them. “They are free. Free from everything. Their minds rest in perfect peace, perfect knowledge, perfection itself. Entropy will never touch them. They’ll never grow old, never die, never know hunger, or sadness, or pain, or fear. I would give this to you. You would be with them forever.”

  “They’d never know love, or touch, or joy,” I pointed out, my voice shaking. I could never do this to them—no matter what she promised. I loved them too much… even Nathan, as I was slowly discovering. “Humans… beings in general… we want those things. You’ve turned them into husks. Hollowed out versions of themselves that are no better than statues. Let me out of this dream. I’ve heard you, and I’m done.”

  “You can go,” she said. “You have a great deal to think about. Maybe, when you’ve seen enough pain, enough entropy, you’ll realize the nature of what I offer you. It’s value. But as I said, my sweet—this is no dream.”

  “I don’t care what it is,” I said. I tried my sigil, and her hold was weaker, but still there. Still just enough that I couldn’t send myself back.

  “Oh, but you will,” Az-Harad mused. “This is the world you already gave me.”

  I froze, unable to wrap my head around the statement. It was a trick, of course. Some lie meant to put me off balance, which it did. The best thing to do was ignore it. “I guess I have a lot to think about, then.”

  “Think about this,” she said softly as she approached me, but at least kept her hands to herself this time, “yours is not the only timeline. Not the only facet of existence. Ask your friend. You’ve answered my call before. You’ll do it again, and again, and again… until they are all mine.”

  “I will never—”

  But, at that moment, before I could finish, I snapped like a rubber band, and stumbled as I tripped over the edge of the doorway, onto the patio, blinded by the sudden blaze of sunlight, deafened by the presence of a breeze, and birds, and the voices of my boys around me.

  Isaac caught me before I pitched face first onto the stone. “Whoa,” he laughed, “watch that first step, hm?”

  He helped me get my balance before he trailed his hands off me, lingering at my fingers. He frowned. “Everything alright?”

  All I could think of was the four of them in that gazebo, staring at nothing. Slowly becoming nothing. I wanted to cry. But they were here. And Az-Harad was a liar. She had an agenda, and she would show me anything to fulfill it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just… had too much wine. Lost my balance. I’m fine.”

  I caught Nathan’s eye. He held it a moment before looking away, his jaw tense. Maybe he knew. But he wouldn’t say anything.

  “Really,” I insisted to Isaac, Lucas and Hunter, all three of whom seemed suddenly a bit too quiet. “I had like five glasses. Let’s get to the garden, and… distract ourselves from anything and everything.”

  I held a hand out to Hunter, who took it and let me pull him close. I needed to feel them, to banish the image of what I’d seen. To know that they lived and breathed and didn’t just exist. I kissed him, and let Lucas kiss my ear, and then gave Isaac’s lower lip a gentle nibble before I tugged them all toward the patio stairs and the path that wound around to the north end of the estate. Nathan followed at a little distance behind. He probably wanted nothing to do with any ‘distractions’ we got up to—but he wasn’t about to put himself back in reach of Aunt Elina.

  And I knew that after my episode, he wasn’t about to let me get too far away.

  After what Az-Harad had shown me, what she’d said…

  I didn’t want to let it get to me, but I couldn’t entirely ignore it. So I didn’t want Nathan far away, either.

  Amelia

  I probably would have enjoyed the north garden more if I hadn’t just hopped into some kind of other reality for a few minutes. It was beautiful—flowers from every season were in bloom, and arranged in colorful patterns that had clearly taken someone a long, long time to groom into shape. Gnarled dogwood trees displayed their blossoms between Japanese maples in small islands among them, connected by the walking path. Tastefully arranged shrubs created a kind of knee-high wall to guide the winding path around the place, urging wandering visitors not to tread on the carefully maintained flower beds they guarded.

  There were butterflies everywhere, including some that were clearly magical constructs.

  “My mother’s creations,” Isaac explained when I pointed out one of the ethereal creatures. “We had a couple of years where the natural butterflies stopped visiting. Climate change, I suppose. They keep many of the flowers in bloom. So, she developed these as an alternative. Of course, the natural butterflies returned after a while, but she liked they way they looked, so she kept them. They change color with the seasons, complementing the prevalent colors.”

  “I never thought of that,” I said thoughtfully as I watched one of the see-through butterflies with blue and purple wings light on a flower. It didn’t move
exactly like a butterfly did, but it moved from flower to flower, cross-pollinating. “Artificial bee hives could work the same way.”

  “She’s tried,” Isaac said. “It’s harder to get them all to coordinate like an actual hive. So they blend in, of course. This place is isolated, only magicians are likely to see it. Revamping a failing bee population means exposing them to the general populace. They’d have to keep from raising questions.”

  By reflex, I imagined the kind of confusion and panic that would take over if Az-Harad got what she wanted. Her realm wasn’t governed by time and space, but this one was. It wouldn’t be instant, if she was let in. It would be a kind of spreading plague that would consume everything, giving the last people on Earth a chance to see it coming and be horrified by it. I could almost see it in front of me, overlaying the garden.

  Lucas brushed my arm, concerned. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

  I snapped out of my thoughts and realized my eyes were moist. “Nothing,” I rasped as I wiped them. “I just… I was sort of caught up in the moment, I guess. It’s nice to just be able to relax. Hang. The last couple of years have been… not this.”

  I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not. But he gave me a sympathetic smile and looked around at the garden, and at Hunter and Isaac. And Nathan. I got the impression none of the three were overly excited that he was here with us.

  “If you think this is peaceful,” Isaac said, “you should see Hunter’s home.”

  Hunter grunted. “It’s not exactly an estate.”

  “It’s still beautiful,” Nathan said.

  He’d been so quiet, that we all four looked toward him when he spoke. He was looking at a dogwood blossom. He glanced at us, and raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  Lucas only smiled. Hunter shrugged. Isaac was the only one to chuckle. “I sometimes imagine you don’t notice things like that.”