The Paper Magician (The Paper Magician Trilogy, #1)(57)

Ceony took the first words for herself.

“Stand down, Lira,” she said, straightening as tall as her five-foot-three frame could straighten. “You want to escape? Then go while you have the chance.”

Lira smiled, looking distinctly like a cat gone half-feral. “Not when I have two hearts to take with me. Grath will find them such a handsome prize, even if I only let him keep yours.”

She lifted a bloody hand—her blood or another’s, Ceony couldn’t be sure—and with it rose from the ground three pairs of severed, undead hands that Ceony had failed to spot, as the uneven rock of the cave floor had concealed them.

Ceony’s windpipe constricted, reminding her of the bruises dotting her neck such hands had given her before. For a split second she felt herself paralyzed, but the whispered beating of Emery’s heart regrounded her. Forced her to move.

Her hands shot to her bag as Lira’s shot forward, sprinkling droplets of cold blood throughout the cave. The undead hands—fingers pudgy and swollen—rose like birds into the air and shot toward her on invisible wings.

Wings.

Birds.

Ceony grasped her paper birds in her fingers and yanked their Folded bodies from her bag. “Breathe!” she gasped as the hands charged her. “Attack them!”

Two birds fell crumpled to the cavern floor, crushed from where Ceony had landed on her bag after escaping the heart. She stiffened, but seven square-bodied cranes heeded her command and sprung to life in front of her—orange, yellow, maroon, white, white, white, and gray. Their quick flapping hummed through the cavern. Their long necks stretched forward as they sailed for Lira’s bodiless army, and Ceony could almost hear them caw a selfless battle cry just before striking their targets.

One bird collided with each hand, save for two who struck a half-rotten hand at the same time, one at the thumb, the other at the ring finger. The hands closed around the birds not four paces from Ceony and, as in the prison, fell to the ground.

Ceony’s mind spun. Adrenaline coursed up her neck and down into her legs, making her skittish. She had to get out of the cave—Emery’s heart rested too close to the battle. Lira blocked the entrance, conjuring her next spell.

Ceony already had hers set.

“Focus on your target,” Emery’s voice spoke in her memory as he had during his quick lesson in the new spell. “Feel it in your mind like your story illusions. If you do, the stars will hit their mark.”

Reaching into her bag, Ceony pulled free five tightly Folded, four-cornered paper stars, just like the ones Emery had worn going into that awful warehouse. She and Emery had Folded them so tightly they hadn’t been affected by the crushed bag. She locked her eyes on Lira’s muttering lips and bloodied hands, threw the stars, and ran for the cave mouth.

The stars spun through the air like pinwheels caught in a summer storm. Ceony didn’t watch to see them meet their target. Lira’s frustrated scream told her enough.

The morning sunlight, white behind thready clouds, burned her dry eyes and sizzled against the ocean that stirred about the black-rock coast below her. So deep, so hungry.

The water sprayed cool mist over Ceony as she darted over the uneven shore. A whip of amber kelp looped around her foot and fell away again, perhaps sensing Ceony’s urgency and deciding not to take part in it.

She didn’t get far before a crackling ribbon of gore circled around her. The shield chain encompassing her torso stiffened. The bubbling blood warped away from her body and crashed into the wet rocks, staining them in patterns like spiderwebs. The spell’s residue left a metallic taste in the back of Ceony’s throat.

Lira scowled and pulled a small vial of blood from the tight waistband of her slacks. It looked like her supply was getting low. “A parlor trick,” she said with a grin that was almost a grimace. “Do you really think a little paper sash can stop me?”

She advanced one step, uncorking the vial with a long thumbnail and dumping it into her hands. The blood coursed over her palm and dripped into the small, swirling streams of saltwater between jagged rocks under her feet.

“It has three times already,” Ceony countered, taking one step back for Lira’s every step forward. “So I’ll say yes.”

Lira smiled sweetly, and for a moment Ceony could see why Emery had been drawn to her, so many years ago. But the expression soured as Lira’s brows drew together, her forehead creased, and her nostrils flared. She said something in a bizarre tongue and waved her bloody hand as if she were throwing a cricket ball.

Ceony’s hand thrust into her bag. She braced herself for Lira’s attack.

It struck from behind.

The red-veined waves crashed into her like a blizzard wind, cold and blinding, nearly knocking her to the uneven ground. A jolt of alarm—as if she had been burned—shot from navel to crown. She ran from the wave so as not to be pulled into the ocean, but it had already done its damage, soaking her to her skin.

She felt the power drain from her shield chain. Two links between her shoulder blades gave out, and the chain flopped down to her ankles, nothing more than soggy pulp.

Ceony felt as though her own blood had been drained away with the wave. She searched her bag with white, shivering fingers, pulling out spell after ruined spell. Her paper fish, the elaborate confusion sphere Emery had Folded himself while she had made the stars. It had been meant as a distraction for . . .