Twisted Elements: Twisted Magic Book Two Page 14

I dared another inch. Then another. And another.

  The hiss of another cloud being blown spiked my heart rate. I clamored to my feet as the cloud drifted toward us and darted for the elevators. Randall was right beside me.

  Halfway to the waiting area, the cloud slammed into my back and overtook me. I dropped to the ground and everything went black with bursts of flames in my vision that matched the fire in my chest.

  Rolling onto my side, I braced my palm into the carpet and tried to hoist myself upright. My arm wobbled and every breath scraped at my abraded lungs. I couldn’t get the feeling out of me, couldn’t get it under control.

  The floor vibrated, and it grew in intensity. I lifted my head as the hallway seemed to ripple, barreling toward us. The walls and floor pulsed with blue magic.

  I tried to scramble away, but the magic rammed into me. My body lit up and my back arched, my head lolling, as magic pulsed through me like electricity. Somewhere past me, a loud thud sounded as the magic onslaught collided with the far wall.

  The sound we had heard from downstairs.

  When the last of the magic coursed through me, I laid on the floor, body limp, eyes closed, panting. I dug my fingers into the carpet on either side of me.

  “Safiya,” Randall said, but his voice seemed to be around me instead of from a single direction.

  The elevator dinged.

  I tried to will myself to get moving, but my limbs didn’t respond.

  “Get up,” Randall said as he scooped under my arms, tugging me upright.

  I opened my eyes as another puff of death drifted toward us, a few feet away.

  Footsteps charged from the direction of the elevators, and then a nearly transparent wall tinted with blue shot across the width of the hall. The puff collided with it from the opposite side and stayed put.

  I panted harder, as if expelling the fumes that I had been seconds from inhaling, and tried to orientate myself. Behind me, Randall was propping me up in a sitting position, and I was mostly slack against his hold. I straightened, pulling away, and looked up at where Sasmita stood beside us, scowl in place as she stared at the wall. She turned to me.

  “I told you the creature is on the fourth floor,” she said, voice thick with barely controlled rage. “Why would you come up here unprepared?”

  “It was…” Before I could finish, the wall pumped blue magic down the hallway.

  I tensed, scurrying farther back into Randall, as the magic rammed into Sasmita’s shield.

  A small crack started from the right side.

  “We need to go,” she said, turning on her heel, and gestured for us to follow as she headed toward the elevators.

  Randall reached down to help me up, but I shoved to my feet and, jaw clenched, glanced at the animated wall before I hurried after him. We rounded into the elevator waiting area to find Sasmita standing, arms crossed, mouth pursed.

  “That was a stupid idea,” she hissed and jammed the call button.

  The elevator opened, and we followed her inside, heads down, like shamed children.

  She wasn’t wrong, but she also wasn’t entirely right. It was all too much to try to put into words, to try to explain to someone who had no idea what Randall and I had been through in the last few days. Maybe it was a good thing, in a way. Even a week ago, the sight of the wall would have probably undone me completely.

  Now, as we descended back to the third floor, I was already over this turn of events. The wall was little more than a bump on a much more important journey.

  All I needed was a plan to kill it.

  18

  On the third floor, Sasmita nodded for us to continue to follow her and led us to her room, the first one on the right. The light had been left on, and although she had been living here for an undetermined amount of time, everything was as orderly and clean as if she had daily room service.

  I had to wonder who she was, what her life had been like before she had cast a spell that went horribly wrong and wound up imprisoned here. Mainly, I was curious how her life had been as a witch, compared to mine. She was the first witch I had run across who, at least by my initial assumption, had been living a normal life until now. Everyone else so far had been either the sinister posse with their tentacle magic, or Joseph Stone. Maybe he had been normal once, though I somehow doubted that. Like he hadn’t been born, but conjured into existence to save us all from the witches and mages freed from the vault.

  Sasmita struck me as something…else. Someone like me and Jada. It was as intriguing as it was unsettling.

  I sat next to Randall on the floor, backs against the wall that separated the main room from the bathroom. Sasmita perched on the edge of her mattress, and her cohorts slouched in the small sofa scooted from the seating area by the window and crowded next to the bed.

  She drummed her fingers on her thigh. “You can see now why we have not yet been able to defeat Winston.”

  I blinked at her a few times. “You named that…that wall?”

  “Winston the Wall,” her male cohort said with a snicker. “My vote went with Saul, but Winston it is. After a while, he was like family, ya know. Not good family, but family.”

  I looked between them and then rubbed the center of my forehead with my fingertips.

  “Winston,” Sasmita said, “has not bothered us as long as we don’t venture to the fourth floor, except for the wards. We’re sort of at an impasse. We can’t leave, but we haven’t been able to come up with a plan to defeat him yet. The layout of the hallway makes it nearly impossible. It has a straight shot to keep sending those magic ripples and toxic breaths, and if we put up a wall, we can’t reach it to attack it. And it certainly wasn’t responsive to our attempts to communicate with it, when it first manifested.”

  “How long have you guys been here?” I asked, looking between the group. They seemed somehow at ease and ready to snap, at the same time.

  “Three or four days,” the man said. “We came here when the seal around the mage broke, with the hope that Sasmita could bind him.”

  I jerked to look at her. “You tried to bind the mage?”

  “I had to try,” she said softly. “I knew there was a risk, but I didn’t expect this to happen.”

  “There’s a man who is putting the mages back in the vault.” I put up my hands in front of me. “They’re far too powerful for us, and he has all the right training and knowledge. We don’t have to confront them ourselves.”

  “Joseph Stone is a topic for another day. At any rate, we need to get out of here as soon as possible, but I can only hold the shield or attack, not both. As great as Lisa and Larry are with helping me out”–she waved her hand towards the man and woman on the couch—“I think this is going to take magic to fix what magic messed up.”

  “Safiya’s a witch,” Randall said, ever so helpful, and I slid a sideways glare at him.

  Sasmita folded her hand on her thigh and stared at me. “How long would you be able to sustain the shield?”

  “None.” I grimaced. Even though I had conjured a shield once, it had been by complete accident and I wasn’t about to get into the details with her. As far as practical concerns went, I wasn’t able to bring up a shield as needed, and certainly not keep it in place. “I’m not that adept at any of it, honestly.”

  Sasmita hesitated, but I couldn’t quite read her expression before she nodded. “That’s fine. You can attack then.”

  I rolled my head back and then tapped it against the wall behind me. “Right. Sure. I can try to burn it, I guess? Not sure how that’s going to kill it, though.”

  She shook her head. “You’ll need to pulse energy into it. I think we can only destroy it by overloading it. Winston is by definition just a manifestation of some messed up, distorted magic, nothing more, but he is surprisingly strong.”

  I linked my fingers together and stared down at them, pressing my shoulders against the wall. “I can’t do anything like that. I can just summon ghosts and heat up my hands, mainly. I can throw spr
inkles, too, but that’s about it.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. Besides the shield, I had also started a car once, but much like the shield, I didn’t understand what had gone into that or how to call it up again. I still only had a limited amount of tricks in my arsenal that I felt confident enough to pull out in battle, but they would not serve us in our plight against Winston, the enchanted, evil wall.

  “I’ll teach you, then,” Sasmita said, matter-of-fact. “It’s easy.”

  I bristled, but anxiety filled my chest. As much as I didn’t like the dig—intentional or not—the opportunity to learn a useful skill didn’t come by every day. Or ever, really.

  Could she coach me? I had picked up from the will-o-wisp kids how to paint colors in the air, but I doubted she could teach me something useful enough to kill Winston in a short time.

  I had to hope it wouldn’t take long. Fiona was still out there.

  The thought alone spurred my answer.

  “Let’s do it,” I said, pushing to my feet.

  19

  I had forgotten just how much I hated doing magic in front of others until I stood with Sasmita in the middle of her room, with Randall, Lisa, and Larry watching us.

  “Pull up your magic, but hold it in your hand,” Sasmita said. “Once it collects, then you let it out in a big burst. Start collecting again and repeat. If you do it fast enough, it’ll be quick pulses of magic that are very difficult to recover from.”

  I tried to keep my attention on my hand, or the floor, but all I could focus on was the eyes staring at us, even though I doubted any of them were being as judgmental in their heads as I was imaging. Of the five of us, only Sasmita and I could draw up energy from the earth, but my cheeks still heated and I could already feel myself choking. I wouldn’t be able to collect the magic and it would fizzle out before I even got started.

  “Like this,” Sasmita said, prodding me onward because I was just standing there, being dragged down by the whirlpool of thoughts swirling in my head. She plucked a pen from the nightstand drawer and then held it up in front of her, clutched in her fist.

  Her hand pulsed blue, and magic throbbed in either direction on the pen, sparking out at the ends. As she continued to pump magic into it, the pen began to bend like it was melting.

  With a smile, she cut her magic and then tossed the pen into the wastebasket by the television.

  She turned back to me, brushing a strand of hair from her face. “The more you practice, the more you will be able to control the speed and intensity. Right now, we want the highest intensity you can manage, so you don’t have to worry about regulating it yet. He’s not going to overload easily.”

  I nodded, rubbing my hands together, and attempted to tune out everyone else in the room. With a flick, I tried to drop a few glowing embers to the floor but I couldn’t, even though I already could feel magic at my feet, waiting to be siphoned up.

  The thing I had done naturally since I was three seemed to have escaped me.

  I had known I would fall flat in front of all these people.

  Gritting my teeth, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to tell myself that one of them was just Randall, and he had seen my magic before; the other two were used to Sasmita, so it wasn’t like this was going to be a big deal to them. Judging by what she knew how to do, it would probably be underwhelming.

  Then the aching, dark truth settled in my chest—that was exactly what I feared.

  My magic was such an extension of myself that every time I used it, I hated how limited it was, how nearly useless. Even when I had no one to compare to, I had known, somehow, that I just wasn’t good at it.

  Even though I loved it. Even though I would never stop using it.

  I just couldn’t let others see how bad I was at it, despite how I didn’t mind telling them I was. Demonstrating it was a whole other beast.

  Now, I didn’t have many choices. We had to kill Winston, and it was going to come down to Sasmita and I working in awkward coordination with our unbalanced magic. I had to learn, and fast.

  Steeling myself, I tried to yank up my magic but it remained rooted to the ground.

  I opened my eyes.

  “Does everyone have to be here?” I snapped, my hands clawed in front of me.

  Lisa and Larry shifted on the couch, and looked between Sasmita and Randall.

  Randall pulled to his feet.

  “I think we could use a post demon-wall snack,” he said, throwing a pointed look at Lisa and Larry. “Care to help me out in the kitchen?”

  They nodded and joined him as they all filed out of the room.

  I turned back to Sasmita, not quite able to make eye contact. I hadn’t meant to have an outburst, but everything kept ending up relying on me and my magic, and I had to figure out everything at a rapid pace. I had just barely learned how to burn ropes with my heat trick, and now I had to conquer an entirely new skill five minutes ago.

  Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes again and then released my lungs. With it went my thoughts, my fears, my apprehensions. They floated away, up and up toward the ceiling and beyond, into the sky.

  As I pulled on my magic, it whirled a bit, like it was having a hard time getting started.

  There wasn’t any question about what was wrong. I didn’t even want Sasmita present, but like it or not, she was going to be while I took on Winston, so I had to get over that right now, too.

  My thoughts floated to a recent memory of me giving a teenage girl a magic ember so she wouldn’t rat me out for sneaking around Arlo’s house. I had been able to do magic in front of a stranger then, and I could do it now.

  I put out both hands in front of me and willed the tingle at my feet up my legs where it shot straight up my spine and down my arms. My hands glowed blue, and I pressed my lips together, focusing on not letting the unused magic dissipate, but to collect it, to let it grow in my hand until it bit at my palm with delightful nips.

  Except I had nowhere to release the magic. As if realizing that at the same time, Sasmita grabbed a small directory book off the nightstand and thrust it at me. I grabbed it and let loose. The book exploded, pages flying in every direction like a flurry of startled birds. I ducked, shielding my face with one hand, and laughed.

  “That was a good first attempt,” Sasmita said, scanning the disaster across the floor, bed, and sofa. “And I might just change rooms now.”

  “No enchanted broom spells?” I asked, standing, but I couldn’t shake the smile. Despite everything I was up against, I had performed a feat I had never even considered trying in the first place.

  How much longer before I could will something to explode without having to touch it?

  “No, afraid not,” she said, but seemed to be musing something else. “Look, that was fine, but we won’t be able to take down Winston with one little bang. You’re going to have to continue practicing. Let’s gather more directories from the other rooms and keep at it in here. There’s over a hundred rooms, so there’s plenty to start with.”

  I nodded and joined her out in the hallway. She slid a room card from her pocket and held it with a grin.

  “It’s a master key,” she said as we walked toward the first doors past the claimed rooms. “One of the staff must have left it behind when they evacuated the hotel. It’s the only one we’ve found so far, so we keep all the third-floor rooms unlocked just in case one of the others needs to loot another room, they won’t have to wait for me.”

  “So, as everyone was fleeing the hotel, you all came running in?” I asked from the open doorway of the nearest room, turning to her. “Why would you do that?”

  “That’s not exactly what happened,” she said. “A tendril came through here and started changing people it touched. Panic ensued and the guests fled, trampling each other—It was terrible. I hadn’t found the mage yet, so I came in here with the idea that I could attract him. Bait him into showing up. He didn’t, but one of his tendrils swept back through and corrupted my spell.”

/>   “And that’s how Winston was made,” I finished with a sigh. Turning to the room, I flipped on the light and strolled inside toward the nightstand to retrieve the directory.

  “Oh, it wasn’t that easy,” she said from the doorway. “Magic ricocheted all over this damn building. Then it slammed into the wall upstairs and shook the whole building at its foundation. The entire wall lit up on every floor—we checked—and I tried to undo it, but I couldn’t counter the magic. Finally, we tried to leave and discovered the wards were in place. Took a few hours to notice Winston. We’d just figured we had accidentally blocked ourselves into the building and needed to find a way out. The wall had stopped glowing so we didn’t think much of it until we went exploring, looking for clues on how to escape, and found the fourth floor had become sentient.”

  I returned to her, holding the directory, and shook my head. “Well, I came here from Green River, Nebraska—don’t worry, no one has heard of it—to find my friend who was kidnapped for a reason neither Randall nor I can figure out, or Joseph Stone for that matter. That was after putting away the witch that destroyed the town. Eliza Brown, he called her.”

  Sasmita’s eyes widened, and she pressed her hand against the doorframe. “He already captured one of the dark witches?”

  “If that’s what we’re calling the paintings that escaped the vault, then yes.” I led the way to the next door, but Sasmita lagged behind. Her expression was tight, and I could see her mind spinning up. I turned, walking backwards so I could face her. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing I can talk about right now. Did he take her back to the vault already?”

  “I assume so.” I searched her over with my gaze, but I found no indication of what she was hiding. “Did you free them?”

  Her head jerked up and she swept her hand in front of her. “That’s absurd. I don’t even know where the damn vault is, so if he took Eliza Brown back…” She clenched her teeth and said through them, “Let’s just take care of Winston. I’m running out of time faster than I had realized.”