Ilona Andrews - Magic Binds

Maria gave me a look sharp enough to draw blood. “Hold your tongue, evil spawn.”

There’s the old harpy I know. All is right with the world.

“This is a sacred place now,” Evdokia told me. “It’s easier to summon the visions here.”

“I’ve been looking into your future.” Sienna moved toward the waterfall.

“I don’t want to know.” I didn’t. Once you knew the visions, they chained you, forcing you down a predetermined path. It was best to make my own road.

“You do.” Sienna turned to me, her back to the cascade.

I sighed.

“Tell her,” Maria snapped.

“If you marry Curran Lennart, he will die.”

Someone reached through my chest and stuck a long needle into my heart. Sienna was almost never wrong.

“Show me.”

The young witch stepped backward into the waterfall. Magic moved around Sienna, like an engine turning over, and a light slowly appeared to the left of the waterfall, opening up like a fast-blooming flower. A battlefield. Bodies collided, some armored, some furry. Weapons clashed, arrows hit home with the shrill whistle of torn air, and magic boiled flesh. A din hung above the chaos, the kind of cacophony only a battlefield in the middle of a melee can produce: screams and wails, grunts, metal screeching against metal, shapeshifters snarling, inhuman shrieks, all blending into an overwhelming cry that was the voice of war. It hit me, visceral and raw, and suddenly I was there, in the heart of the chaos, gripping my sword and looking for a target. The air smelled of blood and smoke. Ashes swirled around the combatants.

Beyond it all a tower rose above a castle, the familiar half-finished structure I had seen this morning, now whole. A huge gray creature, half-man, half-beast, knocked vampire bodies aside as he charged toward it. Blood stained his fur. He didn’t roar. He just ran, pushing his body to the limit.

Curran.

The tower loomed. My father stood atop it in a crimson robe, holding a spear made from his blood. My heart skipped a beat.

Curran leapt, channeling all of his speed into a powerful jump. He shot up, finally snarling, his fangs exposed, claws out.

My father thrust the spear. It was an expert thrust. It punched through Curran’s chest.

Blood poured.

He didn’t grip the spear. He didn’t try to free himself. Why wasn’t he trying to free himself? I’d seen him take wounds that almost cut him in half. Why wasn’t he fighting?

Curran’s body collapsed into human form but instead of its normal color, his skin turned the dull gray of duct tape.

Oh dear God. The Lyc-V saturating his body had died. All of it. At once.

My father gripped the spear and turned it. The perspective of the vision shifted and I was right there, standing next to Roland. Curran’s face was slack, his eyes empty. The ground disappeared from under my feet and I fell down into a cold pit. I fell and fell and couldn’t stop. Dead. He was dead .

My father grunted and hurled Curran’s body back into the battle below. Past the field, the sunset was blood-red. Atlanta was burning, caught in the hot maw of an inferno. Black oily smoke boiled from the ruins of the city, melding into a funeral shroud above.

The vision ended, the other reality with the battle and Curran’s corpse tearing like a thin paper screen, and I landed in my own body back in the cave. My legs were wet. I was standing in the middle of the pool, holding Sarrat in my hand. Coils of pale vapor rose from the blade, reacting to the echoes of my grief.

My face was burning. My mouth tasted bitter.

I returned my saber to its sheath on my back, dipped my hands into the cold water, and let it cool my skin.

Nobody said a word.

I finally made my lips move. “Is it always a spear?” Spears could be broken.

“Sometimes it’s a sword,” Sienna said. “Sometimes an arrow. Roland is always the origin of it and Curran always dies.”

Damn it.

“What if I don’t marry him?”

“It’s worse,” Sienna said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve looked into your future over fifty times in the last month. I think that sometimes you waver, because you aren’t sure if you should marry him. The vision changes then. Do you want to see or do you want me to tell you?”

I braced myself. “Show me.”

She stepped back into the waterfall. The battle splayed out before me again, the blood and smoke, swirling around me. I spun around. Behind me Atlanta burned.

A cry made me turn.

My father stood in the same spot atop the tower. In front of him, on the wall, a creature knelt, swathed in rags. It held a baby up with clawed hands.

I had to get to the tower.

I ran like I’d never run before in my whole life. The air turned to fire in my lungs. Bodies bounced off me. My magic flared behind me, glowing.

My father held out his hand, his face twisted with grief. The older warrior who had knelt before me in the courtyard this morning handed him the blood spear.

No!

I was almost to the tower.

My father gritted his teeth, his face supernaturally clear before me. Tears welled in his eyes. He plunged the spear down. A baby screamed, his cry severing my soul. My father pulled the weapon up, raising it like a flag.

My baby boy jerked, impaled on the spear. His pain cut me like a knife and kept cutting and cutting, carving pieces off my soul. He was crying for me, reaching with his little arms, and I could do nothing.

His little heart beat one last time and stopped.

Heat exploded in me. My heart burst.

Water. Cold soothing water. I dived this time, trying to dilute some of the heat emanating from my skin. I stayed under until all of the air in my lungs was gone. When I surfaced, the cave was silent.

I waded to the rocky shoulder and dragged myself out onto one of the large dark boulders. Sienna stepped out of the waterfall, her hair plastered to her head, her face pale; she made her way to the other side of the cave and collapsed on her back.

“Are you okay?” Roman asked.

“She watched her child die,” Evdokia said. “Let her rest.”

Rest was a luxury I couldn’t afford. “Is there are any version of this that doesn’t end with Atlanta burning and my son or Curran dying?”

“No,” Sienna said. “I’m so sorry.”

“How long have you been seeing this?”

“Over the past month.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Sienna sighed. “I hoped I was wrong.”

“Could you be wrong?” Roman asked. “These are only possibilities, not certainties.”

“Predicting the future is like looking into the narrow end of a funnel,” Sienna said. “The further in the future the events are, the more possibilities you see. The closer we get to the event itself, the clearer and more specific the most likely future becomes. These visions are too detailed. They are almost a certainty. As of now, one or the other will come to pass. The son or the father gives his life, Atlanta burns, and the rest of us suffer. I can’t see any other possibilities. Believe me, I tried.”

She turned her head and looked at me. “I tried, Kate. If Atlanta burns in that battle, I die.”

“We all die,” Evdokia said. “Everyone in this cave, except Kate.”

“I can’t see you in this battle,” Sienna said. “It’s hidden from me.”

If she was seeing it in that much detail, these visions had to come from the very near future. “How long do we have?”

“A year at the longest if you don’t marry Curran,” Sienna said.

That meant sentencing our son to death. “And if I do?”

“Two weeks.”

Two weeks? What do I do? How do I fix this?

“You’re the wild card,” Evdokia said. “She can’t see you.”