“Forgiveness,” Feng cried, his voice breaking from pain. “I was afraid—”
“Humans are lowly beasts, products of random chance, barely above monkeys. You are a masterpiece of spell-working.”
“Even lions fear large packs of monkeys,” Feng whispered.
Yves growled another word, and Feng screamed as his veins suddenly blazed under his skin as if his blood had turned to liquid fire. The ambassador convulsed into a tight knot, shrieking.
Louise bit hard on her lower lip, trying to keep in an answering scream of pure fear. She had never heard an adult male cry out in pain before; she had never heard a sound so raw and terrifying. Jillian clung tight to Louise, burying her face in Louise’s shoulder, sobbing with terror.
Yves spoke a word and Feng slumped to the floor, panting hoarsely as his skin faded back to normal.
Yves stepped back from the male. “You will bring the dogs sniffing at my heels if you try to hide at my feet. You will go and be the warrior I made you and draw them off my scent.”
“Yes, husepavua,” Feng whispered.
“Follow the plan as you were told to do in emergencies like this. Use one of your alternate identities to go to the island and cross to Onihida. Someone has to keep rein on the oni until the Dufae heir can be caught and harnessed — or we find someone else to open a gate for us.”
“Yes, husepavua.”
Yves turned away, not bothering to watch the male stagger to his feet and stumble out of the mansion. He walked down the hall to stop at the next painting and pointed to it. “Sell that.” He pointed to a small statue. “Pack that.” He turned and gazed at the twins. “It’s a shame they’re not true identical twins. I’ll have to be more careful with them. Take them down to the casting chamber and put them into a spell cage. I’m sure they would figure out how to escape anything mechanical.”
Louise tried to tell herself that the spell cage was a fascinating awesome thing. In almost any other instance, it would be. Being carried down into a maze of dimly lit caves, shackled to the floor, and locked inside one, however, was really, really scary.
“Right,” Jillian muttered after the elves had trooped back upstairs. “This is a sticky wicket.”
“Could be worse.” Louise knew it could be much worse. She had at least kept the elves from discovering what she had shoved into her socks as they snapped the manacle about her right ankle. By luck or that weird sense of knowing what was coming, she had pushed the Swiss army knife painfully deep into her shoe.
The electric lights went out, leaving only the gleam of the active spell encaging them. They sat at the center of the spell inscribed into the stone floor.
“I say.” Jillian used a thick British accent. Louise wasn’t sure who Jillian was channeling but she was glad that her twin wasn’t freaking because at the moment Louise was slipping toward totally losing it. “Let’s not give fate any more ideas.”
“Uh-huh,” Louise forced out as she fumbled in the deep shadows.
Light suddenly flared out from Jillian.
“What’s that?”
“Spell light. I made it.” Jillian held up a brightly gleaming orb.
“Awesome!” More heartfelt words were never uttered. Louise unfolded the various blades of the Swiss army knife, trying to figure out which she could use on the shackle. Luckily the thick iron cuffs were probably over a hundred years old and fashioned when tolerances were in the fractions of an inch, not microns. “We need to get out of here. Get the babies. And—”
“Burn the house down.”
“Yes. Somehow. I doubt they have a closet full of high explosives that we can use.”
“We can improvise. We’re good at that.”
“Yes, we are.” Louise breathed out relief as her manacle clicked open. She bent over the cuff on Jillian’s leg, glad that Jillian was embracing anger to keep out fear. Her twin was trembling from one or both of the emotions flooding her. When Jillian’s manacle unlocked, she threw the hunk of metal as far as the chain would allow. They hugged each other tight, just for a moment, trying to draw strength without weakening the other.
Jillian pulled away first and stood, hands on her hips, looking very much like Peter Pan. “So, what do you think? How do we take down this spell?”
The cage was a weird mix of things that they’d never seen and spells from the codex. It had the familiar design of concentric rings, the outer rings triggering first and cascading inward. The inner layer shimmered in the deep shadows of the cave, weaving like the mad vines around Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The scrollwork seemed no more substantial than a hologram. When Louise reached out to tap it quickly — triggering a gasp of alarm from Jillian — the bars proved to be solid and cold as steel. They arched overhead, creating a sphere. Since the inner shell was tightly woven, they wouldn’t be able to reach the more vulnerable parts of the spell.
When Celine activated the cage, she hadn’t used a typical trigger word but a series of phonemes, much like those used in spell locks. Louise focused the light onto the spell engraved into the floor. The first ring contained elements from a lock. It was inscribed on an inlaid piece of marble that most likely hid the actual keywords that switched the cage on and off. If they had their tablets. .
If wishes were fishes.
“Without magic, it will collapse,” Louise said. “Do you think we can burn all the magic in this area?”
“No,” Jillian said after glancing around them. “There’s too much magic here. The sunroom is a mud puddle compared to this. This is a lake. Look over there.”
Louise turned to see what Jillian was pointing at. The narrow beam of the spell light picked out details across the large room. The floor was several large slabs of marble fitted together to make one large block. A spell had been marked onto the floor with a combination of wax and metal filings. It was a massive spell with a Celtic-knot complexity of subroutines and processes. She could identify all the pieces, but how they worked together she couldn’t even guess.
“I’m drawing a blank on how to get out of here,” Jillian whimpered.
“It’s okay. I managed to keep these.” Louise pulled out the two metal-ink pens she’d tucked into her sock. They were designed to draw functional circuits for electronics but it worked just as well for magic. “We can do a force-strike spell.”
“Will it be strong enough?”
“We can ramp it up with a series of focusing rings.”
Jillian considered it and nodded, but added a warning. “There might be a rebound effect. It could be bad.”
“We could do a simple shield, like the ones that the sekasha use, to protect us.”
“I’ll do the shield!” Jillian cried and snatched one of the pens out of Louise’s hand. She crouched on the floor and carefully marked a circle just big enough for both of them to stand in. “You do remember force strike well enough?” she whispered. “Because I don’t think I do — not all of it.”
They both had drawn the sekasha protective spell countless times for their videos, both for the Wind Clan and the Fire Clan, and had discussed at length the differences in the tattoos and the information they’d found in the codex. Louise took a deep breath, looking down at the bare floor. If she screwed up, there wouldn’t be any way to fix the mistake.
“I can do this,” she said more to herself than to Jillian. “It’s a fairly simple spell. I just have to take my time and do it right.”