And then, things didn’t go as expected.
It might have been ignored, except one of the magicians involved was Ian. He was, as Madison had said, good gossip. Some foolish candidate House that under normal circumstances would have passed in and out of the Turning like fallen leaves challenged House Prospero. The duel was expected to be so unimportant that Miranda wasn’t even in attendance. Ian was casting first.
“What’s the choice of magic?” Sydney asked. This evening’s challenge had far fewer formal trappings than most of the previous ones, even with House Prospero being involved. No champagne and canapés, no uniformed staff. Just a large open room in an apartment so devoid of personality it seemed staged.
“Time,” Ian said.
It was a complicated, ambitious choice. Sydney glanced at the candidate magician, who waited, blank-faced and collected. “I think I’m impressed. His choice or yours?”
“His, actually. But I hope you won’t be too disappointed by what I do with it.”
“Please,” Sydney said, “feel free to fully impress me.”
Ian grinned.
The challenge began.
Ian reached into his pocket and removed a small brown kernel. A seed, it looked like. He set it on the table and began counting backward from midnight, naming the hours and all their fractions. As he spoke, the seed sprouted green, the green stretched into shoots, and then into canes. He continued to count. The canes burst into thorn and leaf and then into bud and bloom. The scent of roses filled the room.
Ian stopped counting. He said another word, and the ticking of clocks rattled the air. The rose unbloomed. Faster and faster it happened, neither petal nor leaf falling, just the plant pulling back in on itself.
The clocks stopped. Only the seed remained.
As the watching magicians applauded, Ian handed the seed to Sydney. “It will grow if you plant it.”
“I’ll buy a container.”
The other magician, Hawkins, began his casting.
Perhaps thirty seconds had passed when Ian’s attention sharpened. He walked over to Hawkins. Stopped. Walked one full circle around him, staring at his hands, watching them jerk and reshape themselves. One of Hawkins’ fingers dislocated with an audible pop.
“Are you able to halt the progression of the spell?” Ian asked.
Hawkins shook his head wildly, his hands still moving, the words of the spell still pouring from his mouth. Blood dripped like sweat from his temples, leaked from his eyes and ears. Another finger dislocated.
Ian spoke clearly, addressing the waiting crowd. “There has been an error of magic. House Prospero forfeits this challenge until such time as it can be proved that the error was in the magic, and not in the magician, and a null result declared.
“The rest of you, unless you want to watch this man bleed out, go home.”
Had it been anyone other than Ian, the assembled crowd probably would have ignored him and stayed to watch, as Hawkins, caught in the grip of a horrifically misfiring spell, died. But it was Ian, and it was House Prospero that had just forfeited, and if the error in magic wasn’t proved, that would count against their rankings, and there was such gossip to be had. And so they left.
Sydney stayed. “With your permission, I’d like to see if I can help.”
Hawkins nodded frantically. He was no longer able to speak. His teeth were clenched so hard Sydney could hear them breaking. She raised her hands on either side of Hawkins’ face, and the shadows in the room drew closer. She hummed a low note. Cut it off. “This is . . . What is happening to you, it’s not because of magic. It’s an absence.” And beneath that absence, the same clawing hunger she’d felt in the magic in the Angel of the Waters. It settled on her like dread. “It’s an absence that is acting like a . . . I don’t know, a black hole. It’s pulling your magic through. It will . . . it will pull until there is nothing left. Until it uses you up. I am so sorry.”
Ian swore and looked away.
“I can ease your passing,” she told Hawkins, her voice kind.
Hawkins nodded.
Sydney’s words were soft and low, a lullaby.
Hawkins’ eyes closed, his body still fracturing itself, but his face was at peace. He shuddered out a breath, then coughed up a gout of blood. His flesh dissolved, rising up in a hissing, foul-smelling smoke, leaving only his bones behind, a fallen heap on the floor.
Ian punched the wall hard enough to split the skin on his knuckles. Pain flared through his hand and into his wrist. “What a fucking waste.”
“Is there any part of this that isn’t?” Sydney asked. “Never mind. Rhetorical.”
“If he had cast first—” Ian began.
Sydney shrugged. “Probably still the same result. You don’t use the same magic. Which, if I hadn’t known before, I’d be sure of now.”
Ian’s face went blank.
“Your nose is bleeding.”
Ian dug into his pocket for a handkerchief. When he looked up, cloth pressed to his nose to stanch the bleeding, Sydney was gone.
? ? ?
Sydney sank down into the bath, the water—as hot as she could bear it—flushing her skin. It hadn’t been a shock that the Turning involved death. There would be a time when death was the entire point. But the sensation of Hawkins just stopping beneath her hand . . . There was a wrongness there that was offensive. It was, as Ian had said, a waste.
Water sluiced from her fingers, down her arm, as she reached for the glass of wine she’d left on the edge of the tub.
She hadn’t known Hawkins. Wouldn’t in other circumstances have cared about his death. Had she faced him on the opposite side of a mortal challenge, she would have killed him without thinking twice. But she couldn’t rinse the bitterness of what had happened to him from her mouth.
The spell that had killed him was a horror, one that went beyond the horror already woven into the magic that came from Shadows. It wasn’t a failure of magic, not really, though surely that’s what it would be ruled for purposes of the Turning. It was a gorging on it.
Whatever she had felt was hungry, and she was certain it was not done feeding.
CHAPTER SIX
Madison looked at the résumé on her tablet and then again at the woman sitting across from her. Late twenties, maybe thirty, she thought. Neat, professional dress. Shoes that were interesting enough to suggest personal style, but not so much as to give the senior partners the vapors. Dark hair worn fashionably short, just on the office-appropriate side of punk.
All of which mattered much less than a strong résumé to go with the person, which there was—NYU Law with honors, a Seventh Circuit clerkship, currently employed at a solid mundane firm. But still. Sometimes her department attracted unusual candidates. The last guy she’d interviewed had no red flags in his CV, and yet had shown up in “wizard’s robes.” Said robes had resembled nothing so much a purple satin quilted bathrobe. True wizards, he had explained into the silence of her shock, only wore robes, and also wore nothing but their robes. He offered her proof.