Then I push open the trap, close the concealed door behind me, and leave our crawl space to run back down the hall. I know where I need to get to. Somewhere visible. An open space where Stock can see me alone, where I look easily overpowered.
I race back through the hallway Ral has created, heart and feet pounding, until it dead-ends back at his magic-made door. I thrust it open, and I’m back in the main whitewashed hallway—the one where we first entered this living, breathing house of magic. I have to get back to the atrium, up to the balcony, a place where anyone looking for us can see.
I make a right, rush down the hallway and then stop, breathless, and face off with the right-side wall. “In becomes out,” I whisper, completing my linked trick, and setting up a future escape. A door crackles and rumbles into creation out of the plaster. I grab the door handle and open the door to the atrium.
The marble floor now has a chasm running through it from Gavin’s trick. My staircase still hovers above it, floating to the balcony. A few feet away, Gavin’s bridge arches from the floor to the balcony like a sad rainbow. I sidestep around the huge chasm in the floor, until I get to the bridge. Then I take it up.
I wait on the balcony, panic building inside me as I try to remember Mama’s caging spell, the words I said her final night, the way I managed to lock my magic inside that bottle of sorcerer’s shine. I need her powerful magic of last resort—I need her imprisoning spell to force Stock into an alliance with us. I close my eyes, and my pulse starts throbbing underneath my skin, like it knows what’s coming—a draw of blood, my sacrifice to the magic, blood gashed across the lock—
Then words from the past float out of the dark of my mind like an eerie beacon. Less of me, an offering to cage for eternity—
There’re squeaks on the floor below me, whispers. My eyes fly open, and I look to the perimeter of the chasm below.
“You lose your pack, she-wolf?” Stock calls up. He’s standing on the edge of the huge gash in the floor, Tommy and Rose right behind him. One of Gavin’s Carolina Boys, James, is with them. I let out a sigh of relief. They might have teamed up, like Gavin told us, but it looks like Stock’s team hasn’t found Gavin and the rest of his men in here—at least not yet.
“I came to talk to you,” I call down.
“So talk,” Stock yells.
“Alone.”
“What do you think I am, stupid?”
I throw him a taunting smile. “You afraid?”
At that, Stock’s face rearranges into something uglier, and he turns back to Tommy, Rose, and James, mumbles words I’m sure I don’t want to hear, and begins to ascend the bridge. “Got to say I’ve been looking forward to this moment, Kendrick, for a long, long time,” he says as he climbs. I put my left hand into my coat pocket, whisper, “Conjure switchblade,” and cold, sharp metal presses into my hand inside the wool. With one hand, I separate the blade from the handle. Please, let this work. Please let Mama’s magic—my family’s magic—save us.
Then, before I lose my nerve, I press the blade lightly into my palm. A shock of pain pulses under my skin; then a rush of warm liquid curls around my fingers.
Stock steps off the bridge and onto the balcony. When he’s only steps away from me, I begin. I whisper words of power, and a large, transparent box builds itself like a cage around us, four walls, a ceiling, and a floor, an entire box made of glass, no more than five feet long and wide, and maybe six feet tall.
“You want to be alone with me this bad?” Stock smirks. He looks through the glass and down to Tommy, Rose, and James, who stand, necks craned, staring up at us. “Kinky with the glass windows.”
He raises his hands, whether to dispel the glass or end me, I’m not sure, because without another breath, I take my bleeding hand and press it against the glass, run it around the entire box like a thin, smeared, red border.
Stock gives a weird laugh. “What the hell?”
“Less of me . . .” I whisper the old words of Mama’s caging spell, hope to God the magic answers me once more.
“What is this? What are you doing?”
“An offering to cage for eternity . . .”
“What are you mumbling? Some backwoods trash spell?”
“My wish, to cage us forever, or until I release us.”
Immediately, the space feels tighter, like all air has gone out from the box, like we’re inside one big soul-crushing void.
“What just happened?” Stock says, panic creeping into his voice. He turns to the glass wall behind him, draws a finger frantically in the shape of a door—but nothing happens. Because nothing can happen. Because Mama’s dark magic worked. I made it work. Fear, adrenaline, pride, it all thunders inside, gives me a thick, heady rush.
Stock turns to me, fear in his eyes. “What’d you do?”
“I trapped us in here,” I say. “There’s no way for magic to get in, and there’s no way, magic or otherwise, to get out.”
Stock spins around and tries to fashion another door, then throws a ball of force at the glass, but it just gives a little shudder of recognition.