Midnight Magic Read online

When they separated, Aurelai was grinning like Vimika had sucked the sense out of her head.

  Maybe she had, she was feeling pretty clever at the moment.

  "Let's go upstairs and try!" Vimika bounded towards the door, yanking Aurelai by the hand. But if there was another thing Aurelai had had ample practice at, it was staying in one place, and Vimika jerked to a halt at the end of Aurelai's fingers.

  "It's dark by now and you're exhausted. It can wait another night," Aurelai said.

  Vimika's grip tightened, even as her eyes softened. "But what about time? You said we can't while. This is whiling."

  "Yes, but the spells adapt, remember," Aurelai said. "If we're going to do it right the first time, we should have an actual strategy. Contingencies. 'A hawk or something' isn't going to get us very far if we only get once chance."

  Vimika chewed her lower lip. "Conceded. It's your decision."

  "Thank you." Aurelai let herself be helped to her feet. "Let's talk about this over dinner, shall we?"

  "Yes. But." An impish grin pulled at Vimika's lip. "If we're sparing ourselves, when we go to bed, it's to sleep."

  "I- wh... well, I didn't..." Aurelai's cheeks reddened to the point they looked like they were trying to boil themselves off of her face.

  "You did. And so do I."

  Aurelai bit her lower lip in such a way Vimika felt things happen within her, and her ruse collapsed.

  "Now?" Aurelai asked.

  "If this is our last night here, well, I'm sure there's somewhere I haven't had you yet."

  "The kitchen and the laboratory," Aurelai said a hair too quickly.

  "Kitchen it is, then. Hmm..." Vimika gave Aurelai a mock assessment up and down. "As an aperitif? I bet you pair well with melon juice."

  "Vimika!" Aurelai's eyes widened with scandal only to immediately hood with intrigue. "Too runny. I do have some preserves I was saving, however."

  ~

  With a (mostly) full night's sleep and a hearty breakfast in her, Vimika craned her neck to the sky and gave it a good Look. Just as she'd hoped, the magic field above them wasn't nearly as strong as it was straight outward. It was there, no doubt, but it almost felt like an afterthought compared to the rest. If there was any animata present Vimika couldn't See it, and that gave them a chance to outwit it.

  At least, that was the plan.

  "How come you never tried to fly out yourself?" she asked.

  "I could never get the enchantments to stick. My toes barely got off the ground before I ended up on my face."

  "Hmm. Now that I think about it, I bet those flying instructions in your books are crap on purpose. If the forest had to work going both ways as well as tap into memory and whatnot, he could save energy by making the sky more like a net." Vimika said, working it out as she took in what she Saw. "Without an instructor to tell you what you were doing wrong, you would have never made it out."

  "But you can?" Aurelai asked, turning her face to the sky.

  The forest at least looked like a wall full of shadows, but above them was nothing but daylight. Now that they were this close to freedom, Vimika didn't know which was more intimidating.

  "Flying's come a long way in the last few centuries, hopefully it's something he can't have anticipated. But before we try, there's something we didn't talk about last night: you need to decide what to do with everything here. Your father's books are priceless, the magic used in this place could take years to unrav-"

  "Burn it."

  Two syllables of solid ice thudded into the ground and dared anyone who'd heard to touch them.

  Vimika had no choice. "Are you sure? Think about it for more than a second."

  "I've been thinking about it for two hundred years. All of it. To the ground. If my father is as terrible to people out there as you say he is, why should any of his work survive? They would wonder where it came from. No, it will only follow me for the rest of my life. I don't even know how I can explain my existence to other wizards, let alone that kind of work suddenly appearing centuries after Father's death."

  "You won't have to explain where you came from to any wizards," Vimika said softly.

  "Of course I will. They can See me."

  Vimika gathered Aurelai's hands along with her attention. "Then we'll find a way to leave Atvalia. Go somewhere it doesn't matter. Or where we can be alone if it does."

  "But you have a life to go back to. People who will miss you. Your family will be in danger!"

  "I promised you I would show you the world, Aurelai. And I intend to keep it. We'll find a way," Vimika said. She had no idea how, but there were a thousand steps to take before she had to figure it out.

  Aurelai's features were still a moment before she spoke. "Do you mean that? Truly?"

  Vimika met her eyes. Magic arced between them, but not near quickly enough to catch the feelings that raced out ahead of it.

  "Yes," she said, resonant with the most confidence she'd ever heard come from her own mouth.

  Aurelai must have heard it, too. "Where will we go?"

  "I don't know. All that matters is that we do. Together. And if you feel strongly enough about destroying the house, I won't stop you. It's yours to do with as you please. All I want is what's best for you, and for you to be happy. But... once you do, you can't undo it."

  "I made my choice a long time ago. The only reason I never did was because it was my only shelter."

  "Do you want to bring anything? For a museum, at least?" Vimika asked with a raised eyebrow.

  "No. Anything I take could tie me to Father and his poison. I want a clean break. When this is over, I want it to well and truly end. I'll only take what I can wear, and only until I can find something else. You have extra clothes, don't you?"

  Vimika glanced down. "I may have something lying around. Nothing compared to what you're used to, though."

  "That will be the least I have to adjust to," Aurelai said. "I could do worse than looking and smelling like you."

  "I told you I live under a tavern, right?"

  "You could live next to a tannery for all I care."

  "Thankfully, things aren't that bad." Vimika tugged her hat down more snugly and made doubly sure her robe was cinched closed. Wearing her old clothes would keep her hair out of her face and eliminate at least one question when they were back in the real world. There would be more than enough of those waiting as it was.

  Then came what they had been waiting for.

  Overhead, silhouetted against the clear blue sky was a black shape wheeling on currents of air.

  A reaper hawk.

  "All right, well, let's see if this works. It's to the north... somewhere. I cast Weight on it, so it should be easy to find. If we're lucky, it'll be the only mark in the snow for miles."

  "What did you enchant, anyway? It's not a broom, is it?" Aurelai asked as she sat down in the grass.

  "You'll see," Vimika said as she gathered Aurelai into her arms to stabilize her body while her mind was elsewhere. Internalizing such a thing was also on the list of topics they should have talked about last night, but then Aurelai had brought out peach preserves, and, well... they hadn't.

  "I don't actually know what my body does while I'm Borrowing, so if I elbow you because I'm trying to flap wings I don't have, I'd like to apologize now."

  Vimika firmed up her grip, and swallowed back the peaches that wanted to make a second pass at her tongue. "Good to know."

  "Wish me luck."

  With a kiss on the temple, Vimika did just that. "Let's get out of here."

  The world lurched as Aurelai's magic surged, launching her consciousness northward.

  Closing her eyes, Vimika reached out with her own, extending her awareness to tap into the thread of Aurelai that was already snaking its way through the illusion matrix with astonishing speed born from years of practice.

  Aurelai weaved through the trees like a greased serpent. The spells were stronger the closer to the energy source, so she was essentially threading her way
through a series of circles, staying as far away from the centers as possible. It was an astonishing feat of magic all by itself, feeling more like flying than flying did. There was no weight shifting or changes in inertia, just raw momentum propelling her forward in one continuous motion.

  Before Vimika knew it, Aurelai's probe rocketed out the other side, free and clear of the tree line and into the head of the reaper hawk, whose thoughts registered surprise a moment before they were shoved to the back of its mind.

  Wind. Wings. Vision sharper than Vimika had imagined was even possible seemed to take in the whole world as it stretched unfathomably far in every direction.

  It had been gliding east, but was persuaded to wheel around west again, towards a nondescript mound in the snow. Normally, that would never draw the keen eyes of a hawk, since normally, the hawk was in control of them and would rather search for tasty things that go squeak when their lungs are perforated by four-inch talons.

  Luckily, it was enough, and through the combination of Aurelai and the hawk, Vimika could sense her own pool of magic just ahead. With breathless excitement (and apology to the hawk), she speared the waiting door with her consciousness and hauled with everything she had.

  The Weight spell shattered and the door exploded from the snow, leaping straight into the air. Chunks of white streamed away and thumped into the unmarred field, leaving a trail of bumpy craters as it flew up and over the trees and the magic they harbored.

  Without being atop it, Vimika didn't feel like a bird, or anything else that was free of the bonds of gravity. More like she was flying half of a two-handed kite, with Aurelai holding the other string and an enormous, rather confused raptor in between.

  When the door was directly overhead, Aurelai retreated back to the hawk, leaving Vimika in sole control as their way out plunged downward.

  To cut straight through what felt like molasses made of bad intentions was exhilarating, but revealing of just how little had been standing between Aurelai and freedom. The magic field overhead barely went past the tops of the trees, meaning she'd been less than a hundred feet from the outside world her entire life.

  "Here it comes," Vimika announced as Aurelai shifted with her return to her body.

  The door arrowed straight towards them so fast it clipped the top of a tree, snow bursting into fog and curling into the vortex the door's flight left behind. It stopped without slowing down, coming to rest waist-high above the ground with the same stability it would have if Vimika had set it on a table.

  "It's a door!" Aurelai exclaimed as she paced around it, looking for the joke. When one failed to appear, she looked at Vimika with beseeching eyes. "You enchanted a door? Why?"

  Gathering her robes about her, Vimika hopped up into her normal traveling position. For something that had been purely utilitarian for so long, it felt like she'd mounted a throne she'd thought lost to a usurper after a long civil war. Or maybe that was just a wizard's acute sense of history and the fragility of taking things for granted.

  "Why not?" Vimika asked, hooking one ankle behind the other and kicking the air. Her door was the closest thing she had to a security blanket anymore, even if that thought hadn't occurred to her until the moment someone questioned it.

  "This is only half of it!"

  Vimika glanced backwards. "And? It was free and no one would ever think to steal it," she said a hair defensively. She extended her hand. "Come on."

  "What about the house?"

  "Let's make sure we can get out of here before we torch our only shelter if this all goes pear-shaped," Vimika said as she tucked her robes securely under her legs.

  "What's a pear?"

  "A kind of fruit. Like an apple, but with hips. Sort of. I'm not crazy, don't look at me like that."

  "And an apple with hips… means a plan goes bad?"

  "It… yes. Idioms have gotten weird since your books were written," Vimika said, helping Aurelai up. "Bind or sit on your dress, unless you want to wear it on your face."

  The moment Aurelai settled her weight onto the door, it tipped sideways, and Vimika dumped a panicked surge of magic to right it, flinging Aurelai into her hard enough to nearly knock Vimika off.

  "What happened?" Aurelai asked, clutching her chest in surprise.

  "I must've forgot to compensate for the weight shift. I've never had a passenger before," Vimika said. But it should have been automatic. The intrinsic balance was one of the reasons it took so long to enchant objects for flight use. Then again, between the restrained chaos of Azrabaleth's magic and Vimika's having been scrambled for who-knows how long, she was lucky to have not catapulted them both into the trees.

  Hovering steadily now, however, Vimika goosed the door upwards a few inches, eliciting a squeak of surprise from Aurelai, who threw her arm through Vimika's, pulling them tightly together.

  "It's all right, I know what I'm doing," Vimika said. She wanted to sound reassuring, but now that Aurelai's life was in her hands, she suddenly doubted every second it had taken to make her door flyable. When she'd made it, it was only for herself, someone she didn't care for very much at the time. Now?

  They were still close enough to the ground Aurelai could simply slide off onto her feet, yet she peered down as though she would have a long while to contemplate what would happen before she landed. "Don't let me fall."

  "I won't. Are you afraid of heights?"

  "I don't know." Aurelai's neck bulged as she swallowed what looked like an invisible tangerine.

  "Then keep hold of me and close your eyes. We're going to have to do this fast, so your stomach is going to feel like its trying to find your feet. That's normal."

  "I would disagree."

  Vimika threaded her finger's through Aurelai's, gripping them tightly. "It's all right. I won't let anything happen to you. Are you ready?"

  Aurelai screwed her eyes shut, her knuckles going as white as the mountaintops awaiting them beyond the trees. "Yes."

  "All right." Vimika gathered her magics about her for a single, hard push that would rocket them straight up, and hopefully through the magic field before it knew they were there. She would worry about sideways after that.

  With a single, sharp release and a barked mental command, Vimika's stomach indeed sought her feet, her hat pressing harder onto her head as they shot up, the ground racing away at terrific speed. Her entire body trilled with elation as the wind whipped at her hair, the cold bite on her cheeks as they reached the height of the trees in a heartbeat.

  Then it all went wrong.

  The door suddenly pitched over to the right, and Aurelai screamed as she was jolted and began sliding away. Her hand snapped out to snatch Vimika's arm just in time to keep from spilling off.

  "Aurelai!" Vimika cried, recklessly pouring magic into the door to right it, but she could tell instantly that it wasn't the door.

  The higher they got, the more Aurelai seemed to weigh. The magical net holding her in was not only working, it was getting stronger!

  Pain lanced Vimika's arm, and there was the tearing of fabric, even as she tried to keep the door between them and the ground. But no matter how much magic she used, Vimika couldn't get the door to budge. She simply couldn't generate enough power to tear Aurelai through the net.

  "Vimika!" Aurelai cried as she threw another hand over Vimika's arm, her legs now dangling straight underneath her as she kicked at thin air as though trying to fend off what had grasped her. Raw, unshaped magic erupted from her in a torrent, so fast Vimika barely had time to channel it into the door. But even as it began vibrating from the amount of magic she was pouring into it, Aurelai was being held down.

  Blinded by tears, Vimika couldn't see the terror she knew was twisting Aurelai's features as badly as it was her own. "I won't let go of you!"

  The pain in her arm was excruciating, clamped in the vice of Aurleai's hands while being torn away from her body at the same time. But if Azrabaleth wanted his daughter that badly, he would have to take Vimika's arm, too.
r />   A brave thought, but the scream tore from her throat all the same. A scream of not only pain, but frustration. She could feel the emptiness of the sky only yards away, but no matter how much willpower she exerted or how much of their combined magic spilled out of them, there was no progress to be had.

  "Stop, Vimika! We'll find another way!" Aurelai shouted.

  "No! We're too close!"

  "If you don't, we'll crash!"

  "He can't have you!" Vimika roared, and threw everything she had into a final push, magic erupting from her like a dying star.

  In an instant, the weight was gone, and so was the pain.

  ~

  The world Vimika awoke to was strewn with stars. But not those of night, or the ephemeral ones of snow, but ones that only she could see, swirling and dancing with every movement of her eyes. Everything beyond them refused to focus, in a dreamlike haze of pain and discombobulation.

  The only thing she knew for certain was that she had found the ground.

  Everything hurt and she tasted blood. Her probing tongue discovered a loosened tooth, and she went completely still so that it would heal straight.

  "Aurelai?" she croaked once she was satisfied it had. "Aurelai!"

  "I'm here," was the response from not terribly far away. It wasn't a voice elated to find that it was still alive enough to speak. Instead it was heavy with dejection. Of resignation.

  No, Vimika thought. A clear, piercing thought that cut through the haze and dispelled the stars enough for her to orient herself. With a grunt of effort, she rolled onto her side to face Aurelai's direction.

  She was there, but not as much as should have been. Only her nose and a spiky cloud of hair were visible above the ground.

  Vimika blinked several times, but it still failed to make sense until she pushed herself up high enough to see that Aurelai had landed so hard she'd made a crater. Dark, damp dirt sprayed out all around her like a brown spiderweb.

  "Aurelai?" Vimika's nails gouged strips out of the earth as she began to drag herself closer. If Aurelai had landed that hard… "Are you all right!?"