Legion of the Lost (Witchfire 3)

Chapter 7 - Murderer

The air hissed as it was dissected by the oncoming knife. I veered to the side, only to deliver myself into the maw of yet another threat — a threat that had plagued me all my life.

Stairs were literally going to be the death of me.

My head smacked into the exposed underbelly of the fire escape. Pain detonated in my skull and my breath exploded through my teeth in a sharp hiss. Black started seeping in from the corners of my vision, and I realised with a surge of horror that my entire perspective of the world had changed and I had no memory of the transition. I was on the ground now, slumped against the wall as my attacker shuffled into view. He was even more terrifying for his seeming lack of homicidal intent; he looked just like an ordinary civilian, physically and emotionally drained by a severe work-life imbalance.

Only the knife he wielded suggested otherwise. The very tip of it winked red.

"Ruben," I croaked, desperately pushing away the darkness that threatened to swallow me whole. It oozed through my fingers like black honey, warm and tingly as it suffocated my thoughts. "Please..."

The attacker's shadow fell over my prone body. I flinched, throwing up my hands. Colourless energy erupted from my palms, sending him sprawling. So much power; where had it all come from? The blast crunched through the cobblestones, sending up a spray of glittery dust. It made his bones wrench out of their sockets; some of them snapped clean through.

And still he kept walking.

"No," I hissed, throwing my hands forward in another attempt to push him back.

Instead I accidentally launched myself backward. My head cracked against the concrete wall with a sound like an axe splitting wood, and then all was dark and still.

The next time my eyes fluttered open, an icy clarity took custody of my mind. I had to respond instead of react if I wanted to survive. The rush of power from my morning coffee was gone, and it had been almost two days since my last successful harvest. I was in very real danger of overtaxing my reserves.

"Why are you trying to kill me?" I asked, drawing a thread from the spool of my remaining energy. The air shimmered ever-so-slightly as I fashioned a telekinetic rope in my hands, but the attacker's attention — and his knife — was trained doggedly on my face.

"Because she told me to," he said simply, limping ever closer.

I made a motion with my hands, guiding the rope around his wrists and binding them together. It pulled tight, cutting off his circulation, but he was like a dog hellbent on keeping its chew-toy. Still he limped on, the knife thrust out between us.

Swearing under my breath, I dragged his hands up into the air. He started running in response, ankle twisting at a sickening angle, trying to use his body to ram me into the wall. I felt a hot flood of panic as he plodded towards me, slow and relentless as a bulldog, tolerant of all kinds of hurts in his pursuit of a clamping death grip on my jugular. What the hell is wrong with him?

I stepped aside at the last second and pinned him against the bricks with my magic, sweating from the effort.

"Who do you work for?" I snarled, clutching the stitch in my side.

"You're a fledgling," he said matter-of-factly. "You can't fuel this magic forever."

It was my mother. Of course it was her — how else could this pitiable human understand the nature of my magic? Laurel had finally done the unthinkable and followed through on the promise another had made me so many years ago, deep in the bowels of the Incantum. I'd been a fool to think she could change. To think she'd put me first —

"I don't suppose you'd be willing to kill yourself?" he asked. The neutral tone made it sound like a reasonable request, as simple as passing salt at the dinner table.

"Enough!" I screamed, voice cracking on the word. "I deserve to live!"

The knife came down, but it wasn't my flesh that it buried itself in. The blade sank deep in the attacker's gut, all the way to the hilt, and then ripped a bloody smile through the belly of his shirt. His insides slopped onto the ground, blood splashing up onto my shins, steaming in the crisp morning air. The meagre contents of my stomach were quick to follow as I retched.

"Don't worry, I can do it myself," the attacker said, without so much as a dubious glance at his potentially fatal wound. "I'll just wait until..." He broke off into a spluttering cough. "Until you run out of..."

My eyes widened. The knife shot down, again and again, finding purchase in his chest, his thigh, his neck... and still, he bled but would not collapse. He bled but would not scream, even as the blood in his veins watered the weeds growing between the bricks. I broke into a clammy sweat when I realised all of it was my doing. My fault.

I was murdering someone.

A hand clamped down on my shoulder. I whirled around, another deadly spell on my fingertips, only to realise that Ruben had finally come to the rescue. I felt a burden shift from my shoulders to his as he took me by the elbow, steering me away from the massacre. Ruben would know what to do. He always knew what to do. For the first time since he disappeared, I felt like I could catch my breath.

When we were a safe distance away, he let go of my arm and reached deep into his pocket, pulling out a shining pearl.

"A tiny cache," he said, holding out his palm, as if inviting me to sense what lurked beneath the surface. "An unstable one."

It wasn't the only unstable thing around here. The attacker was writing on the floor and foaming at the mouth, his white spittle tinged with red.

No, not writhing, I realised, eyes going wide with horror. If he was capable of feeling pain, it certainly didn't register on his face as he dragged himself towards us, one bloody inch at a time. He's still trying to kill me.

Ruben took a deep, calming breath, and then threw the pearl with unerring precision. It caught the attacker in the back and he imploded, for lack of a better term, as a tiny black hole opened up and sucked in the different pieces of himself, chewing them up like a garbage compactor. Once it spat out the still-twitching, mangled remains, Ruben muttered a quick spell that set them alight.

It wasn't until the fire cooked and demolished every scrap of flesh on his frame that he finally went still.