Stacia Kane: Finding Magic

The room started to rock around her, as if she and the Darnells sat on the deck of a ship in stormy waters. Nausea slithered through her stomach, up her throat.

Her skin tingled. Not her skin, actually. Her tattoos—runes and sigils inscribed into her skin with magic-imbued ink by the Church—tingled. The way they always did in the presence of ghosts … or in the presence of magic.

It took forever to turn her head to the left, on a neck that felt like it was being squeezed by strong, hard hands she couldn’t see. Who was … fuck, someone was casting some kind of spell on her; who was it, what was it?

She couldn’t tell. Couldn’t see well enough to tell—just a shape, a spot of darker shadow in the long hallway. But whatever it was—it felt like a man, she had enough presence of mind to know that—it was powerful, it was strong, and it was about to beat her.

Something inside her struggled. The noise of the Darnells shouting faded, faded like a stiff wind had come up and was blowing them all away. The adult Darnells yelling, cackling; the young Darnells panicked and confused.

And over it all the words of power were beginning to seep into her consciousness, spoken in a deep smooth voice like smoked glass. Smoked glass with jagged edges; she’d cut herself on them, they’d slice into her skin and her blood would spill out onto the floor, staining the carpet the Darnells couldn’t pay for. Staining everything except her soul; that was filthy enough already, covered with grime and pain that would never go away no matter how many pills she took or lines she snorted.

But she didn’t want to go. Not just because she was afraid of the City of Eternity, either. Everyone else thought the enormous cavern below the earth where the spirits of the dead lived on forever was peaceful, beautiful. Only Chess knew what it really was: cold and horrible and terrifying.

That wasn’t the point, though. As her breath came shorter and shallower, as the black edge around her vision thickened until she could see only tiny spots of the room around her, all she could really think about was Terrible. The only man in the world who made her feel … like she was okay, like she could be happy. The only one who understood her. The only one who loved her.

The only one, period.

She would not leave him. She refused to leave him.