Chapter Thirty-one: Ensnaring and Ensnared

 

I could hear the fighting elsewhere in the prison, could feel the ground shake. Could feel Axer and Constantine come back online. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

Stavros was waiting. And he had my parents.

I stepped up to the last stamped painting.

“The fewer who are between you and Stavros, the better. Variables. Better to go straight there,” Axer had said, moving chess pieces in the library.

Straight to Stavros’s lair.

I carefully tucked all such thoughts beneath the layer of paint in my mind, letting it erase them, allowing only the fear and determination to remain.

Priyasha looked out sadly from her frame. Stavros watched me, coldly furious, from inside a small portrait on the wall behind her. “Do invite her in,” he said to Priyasha, then disappeared.

Priyasha reached out, almost unwillingly, and enveloped me inside. I could feel my magic as it was bound. The few devices I had brought with me to get to this point disintegrated. God, if I had tried to bring anyone with me in a storage paper, or hidden Rock Guard... I shuddered involuntarily. All my connections went dark.

But she held me within her painted arms before flipping me behind, and I could hear the whisper of her paint against my cheek.

I do not regret the years I had with Sergei. Not even the wisps of me in these enduring memories do I regret. I feel your turmoil, and the pain of your loved ones' loss, and I give you one last gift. I felt her painted fingers coat me. I can do nothing against he who holds my strings, but the destruction of the others makes those of us left stronger. And I can give you the protections I have, as love is not an emotion Stavros guards against. Take heed, though, the protections will only last so long. Good luck.

Her smudged fingers slipped from my cheek.

I caught the paint before it fled. Kinsky loved you, I said.

She smiled. I know. And I, him.

A corridor whooshed past me, and Stavros was before me. The last net of spells tightened around me. I had no magic to call. It was the entry price I had paid.

I looked around me, at the inner sanctum of Stavros, at the towering walls of paintings surrounding him. Priyasha was looking back from each one.

“That's why Kinsky's lair was never found.”

“I had hoped that the idea of the Origin Circuit would prompt you to try to navigate it. You would have been mine the instant you set finger to this spot.”

I thought of the mirror in Okai. “I have seen things that temper curiosity. And the Origin Book was always cautious of this spot.”

“Unfortunate.”

I stepped carefully into the atrium and felt the paint wrap around me. I needed to time things so very carefully. And to find the way that Stavros planned to cull. The button that he would push. “How many did he create?”

“Thousands. Each day, ten more. Trying so hard to find the right likeness, the one that would bring her back.”

I looked at my feet and thought of my hundreds of trials with Christian. “You used him. Told him you could help.”

“He was wasted on his own pursuits. Look at this. What do you see?”

I looked at the towering pictures. “I see someone who loved wholly.”

“I see someone who couldn't let go. But you let go, didn't you? Shoved your brother into the dirt, found new replacements.”

I choked down the fury and the other debilitating, unhelpful emotions suddenly clogging me, and concentrated on the ones I could count on. I counted on my Olivia ones. My Axer, Constantine's, and Neph's. “I know what you are doing.”

He smiled. “Knowing doesn't really matter. It's how you are feeling that does.”

He circled around me. “Look at you, with your miserly emotional protections, thinking that any of them matter when it comes to the end. I have all the time in the world to work on you. No one can get to you. No one can find you.”

“But you don't have all the time, do you?” I asked ruthlessly. “Because your house of cards is falling. You don't have the public's blind support anymore. You've failed here at the end.”

He gripped my chin, then let go and smiled. “You bring out the emotion in me. I will hurt you even more for it.” He stepped back. “You are just coming into your powers. Given a few years, you would have been able to find me without subterfuge, without using the paintings at all. Luckily, you possess little skill in the art.”

“Luckily,” I said, letting bitterness show, and allowing the paint in my mind to hide any other thoughts. I looked around at the dizzying array of Kinsky portraits. “An endless supply of seals. Convenient.”

“When needed.” He straightened his shirt sleeve. “They allow me to be anywhere, should I need it. And they protect me.” He smiled and looked derisively at Priyasha, who looked steadily back. “She protects me. Even when she knows that I'm the cause of his death. But she can do nothing—I drank too deeply of his magic, enough to trigger all the protections she doesn't want to give.”

“You've enslaved her memory.”

“You speak as if she's real.”

“The memory of her is real,” I murmured. “The love that went into her creation was real.”

“And yet she sits there, day after day. Barely moving. Useless.”

I thought of the journal, thought of all the Priyashas who had tried to help me. “You underestimate love.”

“No, it is you who overestimate its value.”

“Are you connected to all of them?” I looked around me.

His brief hesitation caused my anxiety to calm. “Of course I am. Come now, we have important things to do.”

“Small problem with those containers disappearing once more?”

A wave of emotion was abruptly pulled from me, leaving me staggering against my bonds.

His hands fisted, then loosened. “I'm being hasty, when I want you to suffer. The containers are easily found. Your little Third Layer girl hid them, and she will tell us where before you kill her.”

I gritted my teeth. Painted shadow curled around my throat as he squeezed.

“I do wonder how you got your connections back so strongly, and your mind. Making me have to work to take it again.” He prowled around me. “It was hours ago that I ripped them from you. No one heals that fast.”

“Maybe I'm just that durable.”

I felt my wrist break. Tears sprang to my eyes.

“So many different types of torture to choose from. I, of course, prefer the kind that you can never heal from.” He swung around. “Wake up, Miss Crown.”

Something shifted abruptly in my brain and I started to fall before I knew what was happening. A shift so severe; a fall in a nightmare.

I plunged into dark, churning waters then woke, gasping for breath.

“Ren, stay down. I think you broke your wrist. It's okay. The police will be here and an ambulance.”

“What, who—” I looked up and my breath stuttered so hard that I started coughing, pain spasming in uneven spikes in my chest. “Christian.”

“Yeah?” He looked at me even more worriedly. “I think you hit your head. I'll never convince you to go to the dance with a concussion—I have a friend who promised upright behavior on pain of death—”

“No.” I grabbed him, my fingers unable to grip his shirt and sliding uselessly to the side. “Christian.”

“Holy...! Ren, fine, no Homecoming manipulations! What part of broken wrist did you not understand?”

“Any part. You're alive.”

He looked disturbed, then his gaze softened. “Of course I am. Two guys saved us. And we're magic. Look.” He held up his hand and I could see a ball of blue flame, so like Axer's.

“Axer,” I choked out.

“Yeah, he's right over there.” Christian pointed.

“No.” I shook my head refusing to look in the direction he was pointing.

“He’s right there, look. He and his uncle said we can go to a magic school. Learn all sorts of neat things. There is even a sport like football that I—”

“No.” I grabbed his shirt desperately.

“What?” He looked surprised, then grinned—and oh, it was the bright, mischievous smile just like I remembered. “Are you embarrassed because you took a hit?”

“No. I'm devastated.” I closed my eyes, then opened them to get a last view. “Because I wouldn't know Axer's name. Not if this were real.”

“Ah, a flaw,” said a different voice, and I woke, gasping on the tiles, paintings of Priyasha surrounding me. “Strong minds are the most challenging, but even they can be quieted, if the lie is tempting enough. Isn't the lie tempting, Miss Crown?”

I didn't respond. It wouldn't be truth to say no, it would only be bluster. But Christian wasn't alive, and, “I don't want to live in a world you create about my brother.”

Something lit in his eyes. “But that is the beauty of it. You create the world with a simple nudge to bring it into existence. I only interfere when things are going too well. The mind needs balance, after all.”

“Inject a little nightmare?” I asked spitefully.

“All for the best. The mind wouldn't accept it otherwise, at least not at first. I've been quite thorough in my experimentation.”

He moved.

“It was a little project I did with Sergei. Sergei was such a sensitive soul. And he created the most complicated story worlds. Though they were always so fraught with sadness and melancholy. He was far happier when I put him under.”

I licked my lips. “With your implanted emotions.”

He shrugged. “He accepted them for a while. Long enough to nearly complete phase one, but not long enough for the real cull.” He gave an exaggerated sigh. “He figured it out. Killed himself. People are always rushing to complete their life's work. And I am no exception. It is a flaw I have not overcome.”

“You sicken me.”

He smiled. “You think yourself above such acts? Let's go for a little stroll.”

He flipped us and suddenly I was looking through the left eye of a Spartine guard, with Stavros's presence riding next to mine and looking through the right. The guard moved with purpose down hallways and corridors to the cells made to hold murderers.

“No,” I said, trying to back away from the guard, but Stavros just pressed me harder against the man's mind.

The hunters who had killed my brother looked up from their cells and jumped to their feet. I wondered what they saw. My face and Stavros's linked together and overlaying the guard's?

Nausea rose.

“How do you feel, Miss Crown? Right now? Knowing the men who murdered your brother, under no orders of mine, stand before you?”

The one whose face I knew best scrambled, pressing himself against the back wall of his cell. “Prestige, Prestige, please.”

I could feel my emotions targeted. I could feel Stavros's fingers sifting through my head. “Kill him, Miss Crown. Go ahead. Have your revenge. I have no need of hunters who don't know what they have in their hands.”

“Prestige, please.”

“Go ahead, Miss Crown. Lift your hand.”

Instinctively, I let a finger rise, and watched as the guard did the same. I balled the fingers into a fist. “No.”

I stepped away from them, making the guard move back. One foot. Two. Then ten. “No,” I said to the guard. “You will rot. Somewhere I never have to think of you again.”

The expression on the man's face was one of abject relief.

“Pity.” Stavros waved a hand and the man started to choke. I reached out to stop it, but the hand no longer responded to me.

And then Kaine was next to us, watching with a dark smile. “I have them, Prestige.”

“One more moment while I torture the girl. Then you will present yourself at the portrait.”

Through the guard's left eye, I desperately searched behind Kaine, looking for the others, but there was no one there.

Kaine chuckled darkly, watching me. “I killed the one, and the other two will be my puppets soon.”

Stavros pulled us away and I dropped to the floor. This was my only chance. I had no magic to call, no devices, but I wasn't without. I wiped my hand against my tearstained cheek, then swiped it along the painted ground. The paint wasn't ultramarine. It wasn't violet. It wasn't green. It was silver-specked gold. I let my eyes shut and laughed. Of course it was.

The ground and world shook around us with the potion I had ingested.

Stavros grabbed me by the back of my neck. “Stupid girl.”

“Everyone keeps saying that,” I said, not struggling as he bound the paint within me and the painted wall in my mind fell. Don't look, don't look...

Stavros bound my wrists behind me, then looked at a painting where Kaine was prowling in a window behind Priyasha.

“Bring them!” Stavros bellowed.

He looked back at me, fingers curling around my neck. “You used up your only move to, what, dampen me? Your magic can't override Sergei's in the world that HE built. That I built. You think I can't fully regenerate in a matter of minutes?”

“I'm sure you can. But now you know I resist.” I bared my teeth.

Fury banked beneath a bland expression. He stepped backward. “You try me. I haven't been so tried in a long time.” Even with dampened senses, he still had full use of the world around him. An upright table formed from the floor. He started strapping me to it. “I will be the king. And you will be my sword.”

“No.”

“You want to rid yourself of your destructiveness, just like Sergei after he learned of Valeris, after he felt that he had somehow poisoned Priyasha, but it is part of you. Creation can’t exist without it. You must destroy something else in order to create. You must tear down worlds in order to build new ones. You must have dark ages, in order to have enlightenment.”

“No,” I swallowed, struggling. “I don’t believe that. Some of the most magnificent pieces have been formed by building on top of something else. By leveraging a structure already in place.”

“In so doing, you suffer all the original's faults.”

“Or gain its solid mass.”

He laughed. “We can quibble on words all day. You can even leverage some of your favorite things—I had planned for a number of things to survive, but the core of this world needs to be torn down and reconstructed. We need better stability and security.”

“You will lose.”

He shook his hand and looked at his hands. “It's been a long time since someone has touched me with magic. Sergei tried to dampen me, once.”

“I know.”

He narrowed his eyes on me. “Do you?”

“You think you have everything planned out, but that was a surprise, wasn't it?”

His eyes narrowed further, and he tugged a painted cord. “Bring the machine,” he said to another portrait. A window appeared in the background of the portrait and Mussolgranz looked up from whatever he was working on in his temporary Spartine lab.

I looked warily at the cord.

Stavros smiled. “Oler perfected the way to both prevent a future Origin Mage from killing himself or from hurting his master.” He leaned down. “I will be taking all of your emotion from you in fifteen minutes, Miss Crown. But first...well, first, I think you need to have an example made.”

He opened two portrait portals with a swirl of his fingers.

Mussolgranz strode through, eyes cold and eerily triumphant. Two assistants wearing half-melted portions of my brother's face marched gruesomely behind—one carrying a sword, one a device.

Kaine entered through the other portal, pulling Axer and Constantine behind, trussed and nullified. I inhaled sharply.

They all looked terrible. But nullified, I couldn't feel the extent of their injuries.

Kaine jerked them to a halt and his shadows tightened even more fiercely around them.

Axer and Constantine's expressions looked about as pleased with this outcome as Kaine looked smirkingly triumphant. Constantine's expression promised ultimate bloodshed as his eyes tracked the Shadow Mage, and turned even darker when he caught sight of Mussolgranz.

“Where's the other one?” Stavros asked indifferently. Even dampened, he checked that the appropriate measures he had predefined were in place on each of the boys. Axer would require different precautions from Constantine, and vice versa.

“He didn't make it,” Kaine said, a smirk pulling over his teeth.

I looked at the boys. Axer slowly shook his head to both sides. I looked down, unwilling to let Stavros see.

“Oh, dear. One of your friends didn't make it? Well, I did warn you about the casualties.” He touched my chin and tilted it. I put every loathing emotion into the look I shot back.

He smiled and let my chin fall. “A few minutes more, and I'm going to pull those thoughts and emotions.”

“Come see the carnage.” Kaine tapped his temple and let his eyes slide shut, shadows swirling in glee around his face.

“In a few minutes. The idiot girl thought she could win by hitting me with a dampener.”

“That's going to cost her,” Kaine said, opening his eyes and staring fiercely at me.

“Indeed. And those who undoubtedly provided it,” Stavros said, and flicked a device. Constantine fell to his knees, knocked forward by an internal blow. “I’m going to take my time with you, boy.”

“Thought he could end me with some concoction.” Kaine shoved a shadowed claw under Constantine's jaw. “Got a shot in.”

“Ah, that's why the entry magic indicated you are the slightest bit off.” Stavros waved it off and Constantine bent forward again, spitting blood onto the floor.

“He failed.” Kaine grinned nastily at Constantine's bent head. “So much failure for you, boy.” Constantine set his jaw.

“Oler, get the… I didn't ask you to bring a sword,” Stavros looked at the sword held by the assistant on Mussolgranz’s left. “Get rid of it.”

The assistant threw it to the side without looking, eyes blank. The sword clattered to the ground. Stavros turned to Mussolgranz with a sneer.

Mussolgranz sneered back. “Last minute creations. They killed my best one.”

Stavros pulled his own sword from a portrait, then walked over to Axer and placed the blade against his neck. Axer tilted his head back, lips firmed.

Stavros let the flat side of the blade slide against the skin of his throat. “Not even burned by it. Been practicing with Origin Magic, have you? I should simply slit your throat. End your life right now. Put you in stasis. Or maybe leave you to rot.”

“Do it,” Mussolgranz said eagerly, entire face lit with the possibility of it. Unease took me.

Axer stared back without expression, but I could see the edges of copper and turquoise bleed around him.

“You still need him,” I said desperately, pulling at my binds, pulling Stavros's eyes back to me.

“Poor Oler needs someone to die to cover for his failures,” Kaine said tauntingly.

“You wish,” Mussolgranz sneered.

But Mussolgranz's responses seemed to have the opposite effect on Stavros and he pulled the blade from Axer's throat and let it fall. It melted into the floor. “Now, now, Oler, you overextend your emotion, patience is rewarded.”

Mussolgranz's eyes flashed for a moment before he got himself under control, but Stavros was already opening the next portrait's portal.

Helen Price walked through. My heart picked up speed. I pulled my lips between my teeth, unable to hold in the emotions.

A familiar, hostile gaze narrowed in on me. She shook her head, disgust plain.

Kaine smiled from his corner.

I looked at Helen Price with steely eyes, keeping my emotions locked down, as she looked around the space, taking everything in with her sharp gaze.

“I have them,” she said to Stavros. “None of these mages should be here, though, especially not the Origin Mage. I can set up a new Base—”

“The girl can do nothing without my say so,” Stavros said coldly. “And I tire of games. I would have thought you had tired too, Helen. It is time. Bring them.”

I struggled vainly. “What did you do with Olivia?”

Helen looked at me, gaze cold, and held up a finger that dropped, as if showing the movement of a body with its strings cut. “I got rid of her.”

Hold it together. Hold it together...

“I hope you have life insurance,” I said woodenly.

She smiled coldly. “The best.” She reached through the open portal and pulled two more people through. The portal closed behind them.

I swallowed as my parents were pushed into view. Dressed in work clothes, my mother was still wearing her jewelry, and that was always the first thing she shed. They had been taken as soon as they'd entered the house from work, or maybe even before. My eyes darted between them, unable to help myself from drinking in their features, regardless of the circumstances.

“Ren, honey, it’s okay.” My mother’s eyes were so blue. Like sapphires.

“Poor non-magicals,” Stavros said. “Look at them, with so little life inside. But it's curious. They still stand. Did you do something to build resistance to the magical world within them, Miss Crown? Or is there something hidden within them—something dormant, that produced you? Perhaps we will run a few experiments.”

My heart stopped for a moment. I looked at Helen, whose eyes briefly narrowed.

“They went into cardiac arrest twice in the Depot,” Helen said. “Non-magicals are frail, though these two are slightly hardier than some I've tested.” She sliced my father’s cheek with her fingernail.

I pulled against my restraints, bringing Stavros’s eyes back to me. He smiled. “We could still make a deal, my dear. You must realize you have lost. Badly. Things can be easy.”

“I thought you didn't need my consent.”

“Naught but for purposes of time. So much wasted already.”

I stared at my parents. They stared eerily back for a long moment before my mother reached toward me. “Ren.”

“Don't worry. I'll get you out of this,” I said.

Stavros laughed benevolently. “Out of their magic-null meat sacks? Undoubtedly.” He looked them over with disdain. “Non-magicals. Their null stench is nauseating. How can anything be so...dull?”

“Don't you dare hurt them.”

Stavros smiled. “I'm not going to,” he said. “You are.” He shoved my mother at me.