Angel magic, p.11
Angel Magic, page 11
part #2 of Sirangel Series
“We don’t know exactly what I am, and I’m not inclined to share with the witch anyways.”
He grimaced in the direction of the cat. “But she already knows what you are and you’re half angel, Selene. That’s amazing. Angels are super powerful. Surely you can get out of your bindings with your angel magic.”
“I thought no one knew much about angels.”
“We don’t, but we do know they’re so powerful that they don’t come down to Earth because their mere presence can disrupt the balance of life and nature. The magic they carry is like an electrical field that influences everything in their surroundings.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, maybe I’m embellishing on theories a bit, because, truly, no one knows much of anything. But you contain great power, Selene. You must. It’s a guarantee.”
“Hmm. Maybe.”
“No maybes. Definitely. What did your mom say about your dad? No, wait. Don’t say it aloud. But think hard about it. Did she give you any clues about what powers your dad might have that you can call on now?”
Though my mom had told me plenty of stories about my father, she’d repeated the same ones over and again, and none of them spoke of his power. Her song, the strongest of the Kunu Clan’s sirens, had been powerful enough to reach the heavens. My father, Raziel of the First Celestial Order, had been enchanted by it, and linked to my mother, Orelia, bridging the worlds to connect with her. Their love had been instantaneous yet enduring, and I’d been borne of that love. I wasn’t even sure whether they’d actually ever met in person. Mother had always been a bit vague when I pressed about the extent of their connection and how I’d come to be.
There were no clues to Raziel’s power other than the fact that he was able to link from the heavens to the ocean, something that wasn’t supposed to be possible—though no one knew what was possible for angels. If only I could ask Orelia for help, or even Mulunu, the sea witch who’d landed me in all this trouble to begin with. Or maybe I could get a message to my best friend, Liana, whose favorite pastime was viewing life on land, but there was no guarantee that she’d be watching, and there was no way for her to communicate back to me even if she was.
“Well? Anything?” Quinn interrupted my thoughts and brought me back to the reality of our confinement.
I shook my head, my violet hair catching in the feathers of my wings. “Nothing. He’s powerful, but I just don’t know in which ways.”
“Then you’ll have to improvise.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Even if I were to shift, it’d accomplish nothing other than reveal my true nature to Naomi and allow her to siphon off my power.”
“But your bindings might break when you shift.”
He was shaking his head before I even finished. “Not bindings like these. They’ll stretch with me, I’m sure of it. The witch was right in one thing, she’s no amateur. We won’t get out of here by ordinary means.” He smiled. “And you aren’t ordinary.”
“Neither are you!”
“Neither am I. But I can’t get out of these bindings.” You can. His words floated in the dim air of the parlor, beckoning me to get on with it.
I huffed. “You’re sure she won’t be back soon…?”
“A hundred percent.” Though of course, he couldn’t be.
“Fine. I’ll try but—ow!” I hissed and whipped my head to look at my forearm. The open gash glowed a furious green that burned the flesh around it.
“What’s wrong?” Quinn attempted to lean forward in his chair to get a better look, but he only managed to slide forward a couple of inches.
“The cat,” I accused, seething. My flesh sizzled audibly in the quiet night and I clenched my teeth against the wave of fresh pain. “What the hell?” I reeled on Petunia. The cat was already sitting straight up in the chair, staring at me. Her cat lips stretched as she grinned, her whiskers tilting as she revealed small, sharp teeth.
“You’re doing this!” I accused.
“What’s going on?” Quinn snapped.
“The damn cat is burning my arm.”
“I can hear it. Oh my God, is that your flesh burning that I smell?”
I clenched every muscle in my body. The smell, the pain, the exhaustion, our circumstances, they wove together to produce an unbearable wave of nausea. For the first time in a while, I longed for the ocean and my mother’s arms so fiercely that it added to my physical pain. The Kunu Clan had never entirely embraced me as one of its own, but the merpeople hadn’t physically hurt me. Since my arrival on land, I’d suffered more pain than I had in the lifetime before it.
I couldn’t answer Quinn as I worked to endure the pain.
“Stop it,” he snapped at the cat with a growl of feral menace. But the cat didn’t spare him a look. Both of us were at the mercy of the witch and her familiar, who apparently could do her own magic, possibly under Naomi’s orders.
The green fire singed my arm, spreading toward my hand. I screamed and flung my head back to rest on the tips of my wings. The two-inch gash had morphed into a pit the size of my palm.
I could hear Quinn talking to me but I couldn’t process his words. Eyes glassy, I spotted the ivory of exposed bone peeking through my flesh, red and black as it burned and then charred. I slumped into my bindings, allowing them to hold the entirety of my weight. The green glow flared with a particularly loud sizzle. A raw cry tore through my throat, taking a piece of my heart with it. Darkness crept around the edges of my vision, narrowing my sight to nothing beyond the gaping hole in my arm that, like burning paper, continued to creep steadily across my flesh.
I slumped, my entire body limp as the pain took everything from me. Then I clenched every single muscle as I worked in vain to resist the pain.
Quinn was screaming as my vision closed to a narrow window. All I saw through it was bright green torment burning greedily, consuming me alive.
“Selene!” Quinn roared, finally making it through to me. His desperation was as fierce as my own.
I tried to turn my head in his direction, but it lolled around my neck, slumping against my back. My mouth was open, slack. My nose no longer scented anything, shut down to the smell that confirmed that I was burning alive.
Petunia’s magic—or was it Naomi’s?—spread across my elbow, inching up toward my bicep. In the opposite direction, it reached toward my wrist. Soon I’d lose my entire left arm.
“Selene!” Quinn’s panic tore through to that instinctual part of me that still longed for self-preservation. “Your angel magic! Use your angel magic.”
Pity I had no idea what my angel magic was or how I might access it. But then the fire seared me all the way down to my soul and I damn well refused to die this way, tied to a friggin’ armchair in a witch’s parlor without ever having kissed the man I was pretty sure I might love despite the insanity of the sentiment.
“Now!” Quinn yelled, transforming into a growl that told me without looking that his shifter form—mer-sea-dragon-bear or whatever he was—was close to the surface.
Now. The word repeated through my mind without tether. I couldn’t hit upon what I needed to do. Now … drifted away to the pain and the desperation to escape it. There was so much pain.
My vision became as black as night. Excruciating pain consumed the entirety of my awareness. Even Quinn faded…
I heard him again, his voice as if he were many leagues away, but his words clear. “Do it now. Don’t think. Reach for your angel part. Do it right this second, Selene.”
I reached weakly … for whatever I was supposed to grasp, but the strength for that soon fell away.
“Whatever power you can grab, blast it. Don’t let her take you from me. Please.”
It was the desperation in his voice that finally got through to the haze that had settled into every part of me. I couldn’t even manage a steeling breath, but I reached and I pulled and I tugged at every ounce of strength within me. I searched my very soul for any kind of power that might save me and allow me to return to Quinn.
And even when I didn’t think I’d gathered enough power, I released it, directing it through every part of my being. I unleashed my true essence upon my body and clenched every muscle once more to endure the ride.
Now I was burning from the inside out and from the outside in. But I wouldn’t stop until it killed me or I extinguished the magic waging war against me.
I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t think. I pushed and streamed and ripped my insides apart.
I screamed and unleashed the agony inside me on the outside world.
14
“Selene…”
Little more than a whisper through the haze of my mind, but I wasn’t sure where it came from.
“Selene.” There it was again, that one word that implored me to respond when I couldn’t.
Where am I?
Everything was a deep and resounding black, the kind from which one never returned.
“Come back to me. Please come back.”
That faraway voice. I recognized it … didn’t I? I wanted to squelch its desperation, but I couldn’t move or speak. I wasn’t even sure I was breathing.
The pain.
Now I remembered. There’d been so much pain and no way to escape it. But I had, hadn’t I? My body was at ease. Nothing burned me or ailed me. Only I couldn’t move. Maybe the pain had killed me and I hadn’t realized it yet. That would explain why I couldn’t ease the agony in the voice that reached for me.
“Petunia!” Another voice, equally panicked, but this one filled with a seething anger that boiled over to the place I was. “She did this.”
“Only because your damn cat was burning her alive! If she killed your cat, it’s your fault, not hers.”
“She isn’t just a cat. She’s my familiar.”
“All the more reason why it’s your fault. Your familiar was attacking her. Did you expect Selene to allow your cat to roast her alive without doing anything?”
The strident female voice and the soothing male voice—both laced with anger and fear—argued back and forth. I listened as if it had nothing to do with me.
“You had to have heard her screaming,” the male voice continued. “You had to have known your evil cat was doing something to her. You have no right to blame her. None at all. If she killed your cat, it was in self-defense. That’s your fault, all yours.”
A vaguely human snarl cut through the darkness. The sound of movement set my heart to beating harder. I felt it. Heard it.
“Don’t you dare,” the male voice threatened in a violent hiss. “If you touch her, I swear I’ll kill you. I’ll rip you to shreds.”
“And how are you going to do that, Quinny boy? You’re all tied up. You can’t stop me, and you won’t kill me. You have no way to help your little foolish girlfriend. But you’ll get to watch me punish her for what she did to Petunia.”
An odd clacking punctuated the darkness, the sound growing nearer.
“This is going to be so fun,” the female voice said in a wicked slither. “I’ve been wanting to do this since I first saw her innocent pretty face. Those big blue doe eyes that make everyone want to rush and help her. Please … the new hybrid, with all this crazy sirangel power, and she can’t even figure out how to walk properly on two feet? It’s freaking ridiculous. The daughter of an angel who can’t figure out the first thing about her power. It’s wasted on her. But she isn’t the innocent pretty thang she appears to be, is she? She’s just one more stupid bitch.”
The male growled and I wondered if he might be some kind of talking animal.
“And now I get to kill her.” Distinct pleasure tinged the woman’s voice. Several more clacks delivered its speaker directly over me.
“Selene!” the male’s voice bellowed through a broken sob. “Wake up. Get up. Naomi is going to kill you.”
Feminine laughter tumbled through the darkness; its malevolence made me shiver inside. “This is going to be so much fun, Quinny. I’m so glad you’re here to witness this.”
“What about Uncle Irving?”
“What about him?”
“I thought you considered him a friend. He wouldn’t want you to do this. He owes a duty to Mulunu to protect her.”
“He owed a duty, Quinny. Owed. If Irv is dead, he owes nothing, and I owe him nothing. I don’t think I really owed him anything even when he was alive. I’m a witch. Witches don’t have true alliances.”
“You know Uncle Irving wouldn’t want you to hurt me. By killing Selene, you’ll break me.”
“Oh yes, I know. Why is that, Quinny boy? What is it with this connection between the two of you? I’ve never seen anything like it before. So … immediate … and strong.”
“I wouldn’t tell you even if I knew.”
“Why not? I thought you were going to kill me.” She laughed again, the laughter hollow and empty.
“Oh I will. If you hurt her, you won’t live long, I promise you that.”
“Tsk, tsk. Didn’t Irv teach you anything? You don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
Silence settled into the darkness, wrapping me in its thick warmth like a blanket. I groaned when the woman’s piercing voice reached into the quiet, ripping my comfort away. “Well, time’s a wastin’,” she said.
The male yelled, “Selene! Wake up. Right now, baby. Come on. You can do it!”
I groaned heavily, wanting to escape everything.
“Selene, come back to me. Wake up. Open your eyes!” The male voice was far away, but I found myself wanting to move toward it. Only I couldn’t move at all. I experimented with wiggling my fingers and toes, but nothing happened.
“Say your goodbyes,” the woman said.
“No!” The one word broke into heartbroken pieces. “Naomi, don’t … for Uncle Irving.”
“Sorry, Quinny. She killed Petunia. I have no choice but to punish her. Wait a minute. Never mind, I’m not sorry, not in the least. She took Petunia from me, so I’m going to end her. It’s simple. If you don’t want to say your goodbyes, that’s up to you, but this is your last chance.”
“Selene, I know you can hear me. Don’t make me go on without you. When Dimorelli had his nasty goblins torture me all those times, you’re the one I thought of. No matter what I said before, I always came back to you. You’re the one who gave me hope and made me want to keep living. The thought of you out there alive, and whatever it is we share, it’s what got me through. Don’t make me live without you.”
“How … disgustingly touching.”
Raw electricity crackled in the air around me, dipping into the darkness that cocooned me. The still darkness charged, brought to life like the air before a lightning strike. As a siren, that was a sign to dive deep below the ocean’s surface to avoid the electricity that would whisk across the water’s surface with a lightning strike.
What did that mean? Was I back in the water? No, I didn’t think I was.
“Selene,” the male voice whispered in supplication, and it all came back to me in a rush.
Quinn. Quinn was trying to save me from Naomi’s attack, but he was still bound to an armchair. The electricity building in the air had to be Naomi preparing her green magic to end me.
“Sele—”
I wrenched my eyes open and Quinn stopped mid-word. My hazy gaze found his first, and at the panic that swam in the abalone of his irises, everything about me sharpened in an instant.
I whipped my head to Naomi, who stood on my other side. Standing with both palms facing me, she towered over me, bright green light crackling in an arc between both palms.
She sneered as I realized that, though I was slumped in the large leather armchair like a boneless sea slug, I was no longer bound to it. Whatever had surged through me to interfere with the cat’s attack must have also dissolved Naomi’s bindings.
The witch pulled back both arms to launch her magic at me with the force of her momentum.
I sprang from my chair, wobbling momentarily as I steadied myself.
She threw two streams of green light straight at my chest. I dove to the side as Quinn shouted a warning from behind me.
Naomi missed me. The stream of her green magic vanished before she turned her body toward my new location and sparked a fresh attack between her palms.
“You’re no match for me, stupid girl,” she said.
I focused all my awareness on the slightest sign of movement, zoning in on any twitch of muscles that would help me anticipate the moment of her attack. When she drew her hands back this time, I was ready—or as ready as I got, considering I still had no idea how I’d defeated Petunia when she’d attacked me. I feinted to the left, registering for a millisecond that my left forearm and wing no longer throbbed with pain. The witch flung twin beams of green at me. I swerved to the right, turning sideways. Green flashed past me, but I was already moving in the other direction—straight for the witch.
Her eyes widened as I barreled toward her. Green crackled between her facing palms, but it fizzled as I slammed into her.
She stumbled atop three-inch heels and went down, the entirety of my weight behind the impact. She flung both hands out to brace her fall, but the back of her head still smacked against the hardwood floor with a loud thud.
I landed on top of her. Barefoot and nearly naked in my short shorts and crop top, I wasn’t limited by the heels and long skirt that impeded her movements. I latched onto her like an octopus, straddling her and tucking my feet beneath her thighs. She tried to bring her hands up, but I leaned my torso against her chest and pressed my hands against her arms with all I had.
She resisted, bucking and thrashing, but she had nothing on me after all Egan had put me through in training. I hadn’t believed I’d progressed much in training at the Menagerie … until that moment. Naomi might have had decades to refine her magic, but she clearly hadn’t devoted much of that time to physical strength and prowess. We weighed about the same; however, no matter how much she tried to throw me off her, she couldn’t. I had the advantage of position and practice in subduing an opponent in physical combat, and she knew it. Her light eyes blazed until her pale irises tinged with green. Green light pooled in her hands and she stretched to touch my legs. She managed a light touch that was enough to burn the flesh of my thighs.
