Heart of Vengeance (Alice Worth #6) - Lisa Edmonds Page 0,110
of air exhaled by a newly opened tomb. I’d smelled it at Hawthorne’s, when Lucy told Isaiah his pack deserved justice. The breeze shifted and the scent disappeared. What the hell was it? Some kind of strange Broken World magic, or a figment of my imagination?
The traces left by the shades didn’t feel all that different from the dark magic I’d absorbed from Miraç. That made sense, because black magic included death magic, and the shades were death. Natural magic like mine, even blood magic, was life.
I had a sudden thought. Since the night of Miraç’s death, when Sean and I had absorbed the sorcerer’s power, I’d thought of the dark magic as Miraç’s and treated it like some invading, alien force. Why couldn’t I shape that power and make it mine? Magic was shaped by intent. Miraç’s intentions had been entirely evil, or nearly so. Mine weren’t. So, as Tom had tuned my natural magic to the frequency of this world, could I not tune Miraç’s power to my own and command it?
No time like the present to find out. I took a deep breath, held it, and exhaled, clearing my mind of distractions.
“Rrrrr?” the cat-dragon asked.
“Hold on,” I told her. “I’m going to try something.”
I closed my eyes and reached out to the traces left by the shades. This time, I let my own dark magic connect with the remains of their energy. Power pulsed through me, heavy with death. My natural magic tried to rise, but I pushed it down and focused on the traces of the shades, seeking the ebbs and flows that would indicate where the shades had come from and where they’d gone.
The patterns were erratic and tangled, but the threads all originated from the same direction—and led to the same place now. Dark power thrummed at the end of those traces. The shades were nearby. All I had to do was follow those threads and I would find them.
I thought of Malcolm and the others. Should I let them know where I was going? No, I wanted this for myself. I was angry—angry at Valas for trapping me here, angry at Miraç for tormenting me and stealing my memories, angry at Moses for hurting Sean’s company, angry at Daniel for refusing to come home with me, angry at Mariela, angry at Daisy and Lucy…angry, angry, angry. I needed to do something with all this anger, or I’d explode.
Malcolm would ream me for going off by myself. So would Lucy. I didn’t care.
I started walking.
Using my Second Sight, with all my focus on following the traces of the shades, I walked across yards, over curbs, around cars, and through the ghosts of the dead. My cat-dragon stayed on my shoulder, her claws in my skin only a distant pain.
Following the trace took me to the locked gates of a cemetery. I manifested my earth magic whip and cut the chain in two. I pushed open the gate and entered the cemetery.
The moment I stepped through the gate, I knew where the shades were: a large above-ground mausoleum about a hundred yards away. In my Second Sight, it was black and so full of dark magic and death that I was surprised it hadn’t crumbled. The shades had taken refuge from the daylight in the mausoleum.
I used earth magic to melt the metal of the gate and hold it closed. It wouldn’t keep anyone out for very long, but I didn’t intend to take long.
As I approached the stone building, my dark magic sensed the dead in the graves beneath my feet. Their decay felt like potential sources of power—which was unsettling, to say the least. I was used to earth, air, ley lines, and blood feeling like power, and even water now that I’d shared water magic with Malcolm, but never death itself. I hated the sensation, but I liked it too, just a little. Some part of my brain told me that was bad, but all I cared about for now was those shades. I’d worry about the rest later.
When I reached the doors of the mausoleum, they were closed and locked. Behind them were thousands of shades. Maybe I should have feared them, but I didn’t. My dark magic surged along with my blood magic. I let both rise and spooled power around my arms. The cat-dragon arched her back and hissed. Not in warning—in anticipation.
In the distance, Lucy shouted my name. The cemetery gate clanged.