Wicked As You Wish (A Hundred Names for Magic #1) - Rin Chupeco Page 0,45
fixed on the ceiling.
Zoe slid her needle into a thin cannister, then pocketed it. “They’re better off asleep, anyway. There’s nothing we can do for them at this point.”
“They’re among the Deathless now,” Alex said soberly from behind her.
“Deathless?”
“Named after Koschei. One of the most powerful weapons in the Snow Queen’s arsenal are shards from a particularly foul mirror, constructed by forbidden magic. Once any of those shards gets into your eyes, you become her thrall.” Zoe stepped carefully over one of the prone bodies. “There’s no known cure for it, I’m afraid. They’ll still be Deathless once they wake, and there’s nothing much we can do for them now.”
Mirror shards. The ice maiden had tried to place one of those in Alex’s eye.
“Yeah,” Alex said quietly, as if sensing where her thoughts had gone. “Thanks for rescuing me from that, by the way.”
Tala shuddered, realizing Alex’s panic then. If the ghoul had succeeded, all their work to protect him would have been for nothing.
“Punyeta!” they heard General Luna curse from somewhere up ahead.
“That’s our cue!” Lola Urduja snapped. “Let’s get out of here before the ogre catches up.”
Tala blinked, convinced she hadn’t heard her right.
So did Zoe. “Ogre? What ogre?”
A loud roar shook the building. Bits of concrete rained down on them from above. Out in the hallway, the lights flickered once, twice, then went dead as another hard tremor jolted through the corridor.
“That ogre,” Lola Urduja said.
* * *
An ogre, as it turned out, was a creature of mismatched rock and granite. Its lower jaw jutted out to reveal a pair of hideously long tusks and several rows of jagged, decaying teeth. It was an odd gray color, and carried with it a foul stench, like burning tires on a hot summer day.
It slammed a hand the size of a small car against the roof, and the whole place shuddered with every blow. Beady eyes, small in its monstrous face, raked through the throng of fleeing, screaming humans. Tita Teejay had hot-wired a nearby car, and they’d taken off quickly, leaving the ogre behind.
“It’ll be bespelled to find Alex,” Lola Urduja predicted grimly.
“There’s a blockade just outside of town,” Tita Nieves reminded her. “Probably swimming with agents.”
“Perhaps they’ll consider the ogre the more dangerous one and act accordingly. Any distraction they can provide, I’ll accept.”
They’d managed to make it back to the desert, which was now noticeably empty, the ogre several minutes behind them. The frozen bonfire was still unchanged, dripping water.
Kensington was already there, cleaving through several shades with his swords and limping ever so slightly. Her parents were there too, much to Tala’s relief. None of the shades could get within a few feet of her mother; a flick of her fingers sent them recoiling, their light-starved bodies wilting from her presence alone.
Her father was more hands-on with his methods. He wielded an ax nearly as tall as Tala, and chopped at every shadow that kept outside her mother’s magic-negating reach.
“Where have you been?” Tala yelled at them.
“Ambushed!” was the reply, as her mother drove her agimat into three shades at once, forcing them all to dissipate. “They attacked us on our way to the bonfire.”
“Tried to attack us,” her father corrected her, splitting another shadow in half.
“Your Highness,” Ken called out to Alex, pausing in midstroke to bow. A dark shape rose up from the ground behind him, but the boy lopped off its head with a swing of his shining sword without even turning.
“Would you put ‘rampaging ogre’ as a pro for the looking-glass route, Zo, or a con for the rabbit hole?”
“I think ‘rampaging ogre’ is a con however you put it,” Loki said, appearing from around the corner. Unlike Ken, they carried a long pole, which they batted at the shadows, keeping them at bay. “And the rabbit hole’s been destroyed, so that’s a no-go.”
“Destroyed?”
“Where did you think that ogre came out of?”
Ken shuddered. “I’m glad we weren’t going down that while it was on its way up, then.”
A black shape slithered toward them. Loki swung their rod almost aimlessly and would have been short of the snakelike shadow by several inches had not the stick lengthened on its own. There was a searing sound as the weapon passed through the shade, which promptly dissolved, squealing in anguish.
“Is that the firebird?” Ken asked. “Looks round enough to roll up like a hedgehog, doesn’t it?”
The firebird bared its beak at him, as if daring him to try.