Nocturna (A Forgery of Magic #1)(66)

Maybe if he’d just talked to Alfie about all this instead of taking him adventuring every chance he got, then maybe Alfie wouldn’t be going out at night looking for trouble instead of facing what was to come. Luka had taught him the bliss of escapism and avoidance and now it was coming back to bite him in the culo.

Luka shut the armoire and turned back to the hourglass. It wasn’t even halfway done yet. With every grain of sand Luka felt his breath catch, a grislier scenario of where Alfie could be blooming in his head.

Luka threw his hands up. “This is ridiculous!” he shouted. With long, hurried strides he made his way to the doors and threw them open. The two guards stationed beyond Alfie’s doors turned to look at him.

“Are you and the prince in need of something, Master Luka?” one said.

Luka stared at him and looked over his shoulder. The sand poured on. He looked back at the guard. “No. Not yet.”

The guard regarded him strangely. “Yes, Master Luka.”

Silence stretched between them. “But in a few minutes, yes.”

The guard looked even more perplexed. “In a few minutes what, Master Luka?”

“I don’t know!” Luka found himself shouting. “But I will know in a few. Damn. Minutes!” He slammed the doors shut in their confused faces, made his way back to Alfie’s bed, and threw himself face-first onto it.

“Gods!” he said, his voice muffled by the bedsheets. “Hurry up.”

He resolved to not look at the hourglass again until he had counted to one hundred, but by the time he reached eighteen he’d peeked at it before ramming his face back into the dark of the bedsheets. When he reached thirty he began counting by twos. By forty he was counting by fives. By seventy he thought, screw it all to hell and looked. The hourglass still wasn’t even close to empty.

He took it in his hands and shook it, urging the sand to flow down.

“Go down, you son of a—” The hourglass shattered in his hands as if it were made of brittle ice. Luka yelped as the glass and sand flowed through his fingers and onto the floor. The glass should’ve burrowed in his flesh; instead it bounced off his skin, leaving him unharmed. He shook the sand off his hands.

“What the hell kind of cheap hourglass . . . ,” he said. He looked at the mess on the floor. “Well, technically the sand’s run out now, hasn’t it?”

He stared at the wall where Alfie should be stepping through. Nothing happened.

“Screw it.”

Luka bolted off the bed, dashed back to the doors, and threw them both open.

“Yes, Master Luka?” one guard said uneasily.

Just when Luka opened his mouth to tell the guards that Alfie was missing and to inform the king and queen, Alfie and a girl tumbled through the wall, landing on the ground in a heap. A lone sandal followed behind them, zooming through the wall and slamming against Alfie’s bedside table with a thwack. Luka stared at them, eyes wide. Alfie had never traveled with someone else before. He’d thought it was impossible.

“Everything all right in there?” the second guard asked, craning his neck to get a look in the room. But Luka was already closing the doors.

“Perfectly fine! Keep up the good work, boys! Making our kingdom so proud!” He shut the doors and hurried to where Alfie sat beside the girl, his back pressed against the wall as his body curled forward in pain. But worry over Alfie could not blunt Luka’s anger.

“Where the hell have you been?” he hissed. “And who is this? Did you just transport with someone?” All his life, Alfie had told him that he couldn’t transport with anyone else; it just wasn’t done. Luka’s mind was too scattered to stop supplying questions. He pointed at the smelly sandal that had flown through the wall. “And whose chancla is that?”

Alfie had used his doorknob for transport more times than he could count, and each time the magic opened its door and invited him in, cutting a path for him in its great expanse, carrying him on its current. There was a sense of gentleness to it, of cordiality between him and the magic.

Using the dark magic was different.

As soon as he and Finn stepped into the magic, it slurped them in through its teeth. It was as if they had been swallowed whole, forced down this magic’s twisting throat and into the depths of its belly.

Then for an endless moment he felt as if he were flattening, moving through a corridor of darkness so cramped that only a mouse could hope to squirm out. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t scream. As they moved through the magic, terrible pain seared his body, as if his very flesh were being scraped from his bones. As if soon there would be nothing left but marrow. The pain he’d felt when he’d used the magic to stop Ignacio was nothing compared with this. That was a hum of agony; this was a ballad, long and wrenching.

The magic belched them onto his bedroom floor. His body was a bundle of nerves rubbed raw. A scream rose in his throat like bile, but he’d scarcely had time to breathe before Luka stood over him, his face pinched with anger, questions flying from his lips.

“There’s a lot to explain,” Alfie said breathlessly. The thought that Ignacio was loose in his city with the dark magic at his fingertips turned his mind into a senseless jumble. He didn’t know if he even could explain it all to Luka.

“Then start,” Luka retorted. And Alfie could not fathom where to begin.