Nocturna (A Forgery of Magic #1)(87)

“State your business!” one said, brandishing his blade. “You’re not allowed—”

With a flick of his wrist the man flew backward, skipping down the moat like a stone before sinking into the searing hot water.

The remaining guard watched his comrade shriek in agony before sinking silently into the depths, his mouth filling with boiling water. He dropped his sword and raised his hands in surrender. He was young, not yet twenty. Still a boy.

“Please, se?or,” he begged. “I don’t want any trouble.”

Ignacio stepped close to the quivering guard. He gripped him by the neck and raised him high off the ground. The boy choked and kicked, his eyes bulging as he struggled for breath. “Whether or not you want trouble is hardly important when trouble wants you.”

Ignacio twisted his fingers and a coil of magic bloomed in his palm. He pushed it down the man’s throat and watched him convulse in his hand. His shadow drew inward, his eyes blackened, and then he fell still.

Ignacio put him down and felt a sliver of new power squirming through him. He breathed a long sigh of anticipation. There were so many waiting in that prison to feed him. He could hardly wait.

A battalion of ten guards rushed across the bridge to apprehend him, but Ignacio made quick work of the men, forcing his magic down their throats as they thrashed and whimpered only to rise as extensions of himself. Many of them were too weak for his power and crumpled to dust before Ignacio’s eyes, but enough of the guards carried the darkness as if they were born for it. They looked to him, awaiting his command. At the sight of them, the magic within Ignacio prowled and paced, yearning for more bodies to claim as its own.

Together, he and his newly minted men walked across the bridge. When they stood before the prison doors, Ignacio raised his hand and the bridge exploded in a burst of wood and smoke behind them. No one would be leaving this place without feeding him first.

The power of the men he’d just taken sent a prickling sensation through his body, leaving his senses sharpened once more. When he touched the handles of the towering double doors of the prison, he felt the resin that sealed the wood. He sensed the mice that ran through tunnels they’d dug in the prison walls. He heard the groans and cries of prisoners deep in the tower, begging for freedom.

Today their prayers would be answered.

He gripped the towering doors of dark wood. In his fingers they felt like curtains waiting to be pulled apart, to open and pour victory over his skin like sunlight. Ignacio tore them off their hinges and tossed them behind him.

He took one step into the dank prison and stopped. As his foot touched the floor it was as if he’d bonded with it, each brick an extension of his flesh. An awareness flitted over him, like fingers through his hair, like a spider over its web.

She was here.

In the tangle of sweat and sorrow that filled the Clock Tower, he could smell her on the breeze as if he were standing in a field of her, a field ripe for a long-awaited harvest. He closed his eyes and he could hear her heartbeat tapping out its stubborn rhythm, a rhythm he wished to conduct.

A smile tugged his lips wide.

Dark hearts, the magic reminded. We must focus.

Ignacio stepped into the prison. “I will do as you wish,” he said, his smile sharpening.

But who was to say that he couldn’t serve the magic and himself all at once?





29


The Library


Luka accidentally tore the thick leather cover off yet another book. He gave a gusty sigh and let his head drop onto the desk before him. The sound echoed in the palace’s nearly empty library. “Gods damn it.”

All day Luka had been breaking things left and right, leaving a path of destruction in his wake. He wanted to tell Alfie about it, to ask him what it meant, but now seemed like a bad time to write on their shared parchment, Greetings, it seems I’ve suddenly gained inhuman strength ever since you saved my life with the help of an evil magic. Thoughts? He didn’t want to distract Alfie, and, truth be told, he was afraid of the answer, afraid that it meant a bit of Sombra’s magic lived inside of him, strengthening him.

This morning he’d broken the hourglass and yanked two sets of doors off their hinges. By the afternoon he’d broken a side table in Alfie’s room along with an ottoman and an armoire. When a servant had come in with his freshly pressed clothes for the ball and seen the damage he’d done, Luka had said, “Do you ever just walk into your room and hate all the furniture?”

And now, while he tried to research Sombra in the library as Alfie had asked, yet another book suffered by his hand.

The quiet of the library made his skin crawl. On any day, it would bother him, but today, when he so longed for noise and chaos and distraction to keep him from thinking about Alfie, the silent library was the last place he wanted to be. But Alfie had asked him to do research to try to discover if Sombra had any weakness that would help him and Finn, and so he’d called upon the library attendants to pull every book on Castallano mythology that the library had to offer.

Two new books floated down from the shelves behind him to rest on the dark wood desk, sent by the only librarians who remained here instead of celebrating the festival like everyone else. The books opened before him and their pages fluttered open to Sombra’s myth. Luka bit back a sigh in frustration as he read. The attendants kept finding more maldito books about Sombra, but each one he read held nothing of value. Nothing that he and Alfie had not heard before. This was pointless. All the while, with every passing minute his fear for Alfie’s life hollowed him out, leaving a husk of panic in its place.