Witch & Wizard 04 - The Kiss Read online

  But suddenly I don’t know if that’s what I want. Suddenly it feels like I can barely see through the smoke, or breathe through his kisses. And the fire is spreading, the heat choking….

  My magic has never felt so totally out of control.

  “Wait.” I step back abruptly, breaking the embrace.

  “What’s wrong?” Heath asks, breathless.

  Nothing. I shake my head. Everything. My hair is still sending off sparks, betraying my desire, and I can’t explain why I don’t want to step through that doorway.

  I just don’t know if I’m ready.

  There’s a final swell of heat before my fire starts to sizzle out. But the front of the building is still burning.What have I done?

  Heath reaches for my hand. “It’s okay, Wisty.” There’s concern in his voice, but his touch is still too hot, and I involuntarily pull away. Even as I do it, it’s breaking my heart.

  “I just can’t,” I whisper, and before he can say another word, I turn from him and—hearing that sirens are already on their way—I flee.

  Tears streak down my cheeks as I run. It’s not supposed to be like this. Until this moment, I’d taken pride in the strength of my magic. But right now, running from a burning building because I’m afraid of what power a kiss could have, I just feel humiliated.

  And angry.

  Shrieking, I light up the alley with a handful of lightning bolts, and a dozen windows shatter as a frustrated sob tears out of my throat.

  I throw fireballs at garbage cans, and they erupt into blazing bonfires.

  With a frustrated yell, I kick one over, and the fire shoots outward as the air hits it. It blazes up a nearby building and seems to chase me down the block.

  I’m aware of people watching me now—of frowning faces and wide, fearful eyes peering out of the cracks of doorways and from behind window shades.

  The fire is reflected in mirrored windows on both sides of the street. It feels like it’s just getting bigger and bigger, surrounding me. My hair is still sparking, and the smoke trails after me all the way down the street.

  No wonder they’re afraid of me.

  Chapter 44

  Whit

  “YOU PROMISED ME, WHIT!” Celia moans, distraught.

  “You promised me you wouldn’t come up the Mountain.”

  “I actually promised I wouldn’t go to the King,” I say, guiltily. “And I haven’t.”

  Her withering look makes me feel like an even bigger jerk. I don’t think Celia’s ever been really angry with me—not like this. “I’m sorry, Celes. I didn’t have a choice. You wouldn’t believe how bad it’s gotten in the City. Someone needed to negotiate—”

  “I’m telling you, the Wizard King does not negotiate!”

  Celia’s not a floating head in the sky this time. Not a far-off voice. Not even a shimmering Half-light in Shadowland, capable of emotion but not of being held.

  This time, she’s pacing the rocky terrain of the Mountain, right in front of our camp, and Celia looks like she did in high school that day her grandmother died, with red-rimmed eyes and a sniffling nose. Her tears drip down skin that doesn’t even glow. This time, she’s flawed and blotchy and angry.

  And she seems so, so real.

  “Is this still a dream?” I wonder aloud.

  I keep reaching out to see if her arms are solid, and if I can pinch her thick, curly hair between my fingers. The forest is weird, though. I think she’s in front of one tree, but every time I reach my hand out, I realize she’s somewhere else.

  “Are you even listening to me?” she demands, turning. Even her agitation seems so… human again.

  “Are you alive?” I blurt out, before I can stop myself.

  The question itself seems to rattle her even more. “No, baby. I’m dead and buried.” Celia looks at me hard. “Remember?”

  “I remember…” I say, uncertain, but it’s so hard to deny what’s in front of me now.

  Celia shakes her head. “You’re confused. I came to warn you, but it’s too late. You can’t even see me, not really.”

  The accusation makes my heart ache. “I can see you,” I protest. “You’re more beautiful than ever.” But Celia shakes her head, and my step toward her seems to take me backward again, to the other side of the boulders.

  “Get back to Wisty, now, Whit!” she commands urgently. “She needs you.”

  Her mention of Wisty makes me nervous. Hopefully Byron is looking out for her.

  “I’m going back to the City soon. I just have to get Pearl first.”

  “Pearl’s already lost!” Celia insists. “They’re all lost. The Mountain King takes them.”

  “The kids? We can take them back, though. I saw the camp—”

  “No, he takes them,” she repeats, eyes wild. “Cleans them. The children aren’t there anymore. They’re all washed away.”

  I shake my head sadly, thinking maybe she means the river that the dead cross to Beyond. “I’m sorry, Celes. I don’t understand.”

  “Listen to me!” she screams angrily. “I tried to warn you before. I tried to warn you because I love you!” Her shoulders heave as she starts to cry.

  “You know I’ll always love you, too, Celia, right?” I tell her. But she sobs harder, burying her face in her hands. “It’s okay. Don’t cry. Look at me. Please.”

  But when she looks up at me, there’s only blankness. Her face is wiped clean.

  I recoil and jerk awake, and I’m in the same place in the forest, but still in my sleeping bag, and colder than I ever remember being.

  Janine hovers over me, her head filling up my view in place of Celia’s, and I’m relieved to see her face is still there, with all its freckles and her emerald eyes, spilling over with tears.

  What’s wrong?

  “You were talking in your sleep.” She shakes her head. “About Celia.”

  Oh, no.

  “Wait,” I say, sitting up and touching her hand. “Janine, that wasn’t—”

  “Even now, even after everything, you just can’t let her go,” she says, pulling her hand from my grasp and marching off through the thicket of the trees.

  I’m struggling to free myself from the blankets when I hear her scream.

  Chapter 45

  Whit

  JANINE BURSTS BACK into the clearing, stumbling into me as she looks over her shoulder.

  “What happened?” I ask urgently, looking around for the threat. “Are you okay?”

  “It’s Margo,” Janine says in a thin, whimpering voice, her eyes wide.

  Margo? I frown, looking for a head wound or a sign that Janine is injured. That makes no sense.

  Feffer starts barking, and Ross blinks up at us sleepily from his rocky bed. “Who’s Margo?”

  “The original Resistance badass,” the girl answers as she steps from behind the pines.

  She does look like Wisty’s best friend, purple camo pants and all. Only there’s no ash in her blond hair, and her eyes positively sparkle with life. Which explains the shock on Janine’s face: Margo was murdered by The One.

  She’s been dead for over a year.

  “Hey, guys,” says the walking, talking, breathing Margo.

  I gape at her in disbelief. I saw the execution. I watched you go up in smoke.

  Didn’t I? The One killed a girl that day, a girl who wore Margo’s punky, star-covered sneakers. A girl whose face we never saw under the hood. It had to be her, though. Right?

  “Hey, Margo,” I answer uneasily, not knowing where to start. Where have you been all this time? How did you find us on this Mountain? What does dying feel like? “What’s… up?”

  “We thought it’d be fun to get the old crew back together.” She cocks her head.

  We?

  Sasha is walking through the trees in our direction.

  “Ohhh,” Ross manages to squeak before he passes out in a dead faint.

  I’m not feeling so well myself. We buried Sasha yesterday, spent hours chipping at the cold grou
nd to dig his grave, and here he is, lumbering toward us.

  Feffer whines—a high, nervous plea.

  The blood is gone from the bandanna Sasha wears tied around his head, and there’s no trace of the hole the arrow blazed through his chest.

  “Hi, pup.” He holds out a hand, but the dog backs away from his touch with her tail between her legs.

  “Whaddaya say we find us some Mountain boys to kill?” Margo suggests. She picks up a hefty rock with a sharp edge and tosses it up a few times.

  Janine’s eyes flick to mine. It’s Margo’s voice, but tough or not, she was too scrawny to lift a rock like that, and she never would’ve been excited about killing someone.

  I start to back away, and feel arms lock around my waist in an embrace.

  I turn, and it’s just like in the dream.

  Celia’s here, in these woods, not a floating head in the sky.

  “I’ve missed you, Whit,” Celia says.

  I guess it’s not like the dream, though, because this time, her cheeks are pink from the cold, and I can feel her arms solid around me.

  Real.

  For a moment I’m dizzy, and feel the tears freezing on my cheeks.

  “Whit—” Janine says sharply, her tone more terrified than hurt.

  When I look toward her voice, I see Margo’s smiling face transform as her eyes overflow with tiny white worms.

  Dead and buried.

  I jerk back in revulsion, but Celia’s grip on me tightens as she opens her sweet lips that I used to know so well… and a cloud of black insects erupts out of her mouth.

  Bees.

  I swat at the air, trying to dodge them like I’ve dodged so many Demons, but there are too many swarming around me. I drop to the ground, trying to cover my head from thestings as my ears pound with their furious hum.

  Feffer is barking frantically now, Janine is screaming, and I’m gagging on the buzzing bodies, invisible fingers tightening around my throat.

  “Enough!” a woman’s sharp voice warns.

  The air clears, the buzz stops, and I squint up from my fetal position on the ground, wondering what to make of our savior. In the bright morning light, she seems to blend in with the Mountain. She wears a cloak of speckled white feathers, with a few in her silvery-blond hair. Piercing eyes look out with distaste at the figures around me.

  But… they’ve changed. Sasha and Margo have been replaced by large men with dreadlocks and beards. Where Celia stood, a boulder of a man with a glass eye fixes the woman with his unsettling stare.

  This seems to be magic unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

  “We were sent to kill them,” the big man says gruffly. “By the King himself.”

  “I’ll answer to the King,” the feathered woman replies. “As for Whit Allgood…” She turns to me. “I hear you’re a healer. Can you prove it?”

  Chapter 46

  Whit

  WE RIDE FOR HOURS, higher into the frigid air, until it seems that the Kingdom must be built on clouds.

  “We were supposed to kill them, Izbella,” the man with a glass eye says to the feathered woman. He still looks gigantic and vicious as he glowers down from his fierce-looking warhorse.

  “I said I would handle it, Larsht,” the woman says icily. Larsht scowls, but doesn’t say another word.

  We creep along a narrow, treacherous ridge, bowing dangerously outward over the emptiness. When we round the corner along the cliff, a great Mountain Kingdom unfolds out of nowhere, its lands sprawling across the valley below.

  The buildings are short and squat, nestled like teeth in the snow of the sloping hillside, and vast mountain lakes are as flat and peaceful as the cloudless sky. Something stirs in me—something like poetry—and Janine seems to feel it, too.

  “It’s breathtaking,” she gasps, shading her eyes from the sun.

  “Isn’t it, though?” asks Izbella, urging her horse onward.

  Above the Kingdom’s gates, a banner with a white leopard streams, and inside, it’s not at all what I expected. There are no towering buildings here, or signs of busy commerce. But the squat structures of rock and wood are anything but crude, and the uneven rocky path of the journey has been replaced with smooth, paved streets.

  “Much cleaner than your City, isn’t it?” Larsht says as we approach the modest castle that looms ahead. “No rats, no disease, no filth. The people here are cleansed by the King himself.”

  “It’s a superior way to live,” Izbella agrees.

  I study this strange woman—so full of contradictions I don’t know what to make of her. She’s brought me here to save someone, but isn’t concerned with tortured children. She has obvious authority in this Kingdom, but defies her King to save people she disdains.

  “If you have all this already…” I ask, “why do you want us?”

  Izbella shifts uncomfortably in her saddle. “That’s something you’ll have to ask the King.” She clicks her tongue, and the white horse gallops ahead of us down the street.

  Larsht leans toward us. “Because your kind of idiot can’t be trusted,” he sneers, his eyes menacing and his breath sour. “You’ve never been able to take care of yourselves. Don’t you know that children are made to work, not rule?”

  I let out a shaky breath as we pass under the last row of banners before the castle, images of white cats flapping violently in the wind above us.

  Let’s see what you’re made of, Whit Allgood.

  Chapter 47

  Whit

  FROM THE MOMENT I set foot inside the castle walls, I know it, deep in my bones: Something is terribly wrong here.

  The chamber is dimly lit, bitter cold, and stinks of death.

  Guards stand posted, holding us at the doorway until the signal is given for us to enter, and so I can’t really tell what’s going on.

  The windows are blacked out, and though there’s a fireplace, no coals warm the hearth. Shadowy shapes move across the room wearing masks, and they seem to be performing some dark ritual.

  I crane my neck to peer in and suddenly understand why I’m there.

  A kid lies on a table near the back of the room, naked to the waist. By his face, I’d guess he was about thirteen or fourteen. But the bones protrude from his frail body, and his twisted, underdeveloped legs make him appear smaller and younger. He writhes in pain.

  The hooded figures hold scythes over him, I realize with dismay. The long, curved blades are gruesome, made for messy work, and I’m reminded of the mutilated children.

  The gloved hands are lowering the blades. Oh, god, oh, god.

  “Don’t,” I bark, lunging forward into the room.

  Right before Larsht’s giant hands yank me roughly back, I see my mistake: it isn’t limbs the scythes are for—it’s ice. Huge blocks of ice are mounted on a stand, and the hooded fingers are shaving it into long, frosty strips over the boy. Even his table is made of ice.

  I don’t understand, though. Don’t they see? They’re just making it worse.

  The kid coughs hard, the sound rattling in his chest, and he shudders as the ice water runs over him, melting as it touches his feverish skin.

  The masks are to prevent the spreading of the infection. It’s so virulent, you can almost smell it on him.

  “You won’t fix him that way,” I tell the icemen. “He needs the fever to help him heal. He needs the warmth to burn the sickness from the inside out.”

  “He wants to make my boy filthy with fire!” Larsht says, shoving me into the wall.

  “Can I just see him?” I ask. “I might be able to help.”

  “We don’t want your poison.” Other soldiers join in the taunts. “Make the stranger clean!”

  Two sentries step from the shadows with dirk and axe in hand, edging me backward, and I start to press against the wall like a cornered animal, my nerves raw.

  This could get ugly, and after the bizarre episode with our dead friends, I have no idea what any of these Mountain magicians is capable of. I watch for sudden mov
ements, for just one hand reaching for an axe….

  “Let him come inside,” Izbella says in a low, even voice. It seems like she’s materialized out of thin air. As the soldiers clear a path, Izbella’s feathered cloak rustles as she leads me across the floor. Janine and Ross stay behind.

  “Can you heal him?” asks a woman who can only be the boy’s mother, clasping my hands in her own. Her face is masked, but the desperation in her eyes reminds me of Mama May Neederman.

  Can I heal him?

  “I…” I think of Sasha, and how I couldn’t save him, how the magic wouldn’t come. I’m strong again, though. I can do this—I’ve done it before. “I think so.” I nod, looking up into the kid’s mother’s shining eyes.

  “Don’t touch him!” Larsht is elbowing his way into the chamber again. “The King said the ice would mend him—that the cold would cleanse him!” the grizzled man protests stubbornly.

  “And have his lungs cleared?” his wife cries. “I can feel him slipping away from us, Larsht.” She touches his arm, pleading. “Can’t you see the life going out of him?”

  Larsht flings her hand away. “There’s only one person here who’s going to die today,” he barks. “And that’s Whitford Allgood.”

  My temper flares at this death warrant, but right now there’s a child suffering, and it doesn’t matter which side of the enemy line he’s on.

  “Step aside.” Izbella’s voice is sharp and unyielding this time. “Leave us,” the feathered woman commands Larsht.

  He glowers over her, but some of the fight seems to go out of him as he watches his crippled son wheeze and tremble on the table.

  “If you would see your son live, let this boy do his work.”

  Chapter 48

  Whit

  IZBELLA’S WORDS IGNITE the buzz of power within me. Somehow I know now: I was meant to be here, at this moment, on this forsaken Mountain. I was meant to save this boy.

  On Izbella’s command, the guards retreat from the claustrophobic chamber, and the dark cloaks shuffle out of my way, melting into the shadows.

  I move closer to the table, where a dim glow from the single flickering bulb makes the ice shimmer. The block glows with a cold light as if lit from within, but the boy’s life light is almost extinguished.