The Breaker (The Secret of Spellshadow Manor #2)(50)

Overhead, the sky was an even, dull gray, the monochromatic shades blending into one another without much definition. It felt as if it might rain.

Uncovering the hatch in the ground, Alex dropped down into the familiar subterranean vault. It was chilly at first, but the room warmed up quickly once Alex lit the torches that stood in the brackets on the earthen walls. The flames flickered and danced, casting lively shadows across the hard-packed floor.

Without Jari or Natalie to help, Alex knew he’d need something to practice on. As he wandered over to the crumbling wine racks at the back of the cellar, he could still make out the indentations in the floor where they had sparred last time, and felt the returning pang of disappointment that his friends were not there with him. Pushing it stubbornly away, he brushed a finger over the remaining bottles that lay within the disintegrating honeycomb of shelves until he found one he liked the look of.

Carefully, he pulled the dusty wine bottle from the rack, sending up a puff of dirt as he did so. A small brown tag was tied to the neck of the bottle. Curious, he turned the card over and read the name. Fields of Sorrow, 1908.

Alex felt a sudden pulse of fury as he turned the bottle over and read the label, which bore the same foul name as the tag. He had seen it before—he knew he had seen it before. It was all coming back to him. He had seen the name when Aamir had brought him down here and left him alone that first time, when Elias had appeared to him. The name had meant nothing then, but now it meant everything.

The sudden realization made Alex feel sick with disgust. The Mages had celebrated the genocide of his people, had even named a vintage after it. Blood-red wine to toast the blood-soaked battlefields that had wiped out his kind. He wanted to smash the bottle then and there, but, breathing deeply, he moved it into the center of the room.

Pulling the slim notebook from his pocket, he formed the familiar square screen between his palms and read over a number of the techniques, wanting to put them into practical use on the vile bottle and its abhorrent name. Shaking off his anger, he stood at one end of the cellar, close to the old indentations on the ground, and let the anti-magic flow through him. The tendrils of black and silver rippled smoothly around his fingertips, awaiting instruction. Pinching the vaporous substance between his fingers, he forged shards of glinting ice that shone with dark menace in the torchlight. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he sent the shards hurtling toward the bottle on the floor, creating a whoosh of air as they shot across the room.

With some disappointment, Alex saw they had missed the bottle, but pride washed over him as he noted the shards sticking out of the ground nearby, holding their form for a moment or two before they began to melt. The savage tips had been sharp enough to cut into the hard ground, where before they would have shattered and snapped before they had even reached it. He was definitely making progress.

His confidence boosted, he kept his eyes on the bottle as he forged a dense shield around it, using the inverse technique he had figured out from Gaze’s class. Once he was certain it was strong enough, the anti-magic pulsing and crackling with vivid silver sparks, he held the shield steady with one hand as he conjured the body of an ice spear with the other. Brow furrowed, he focused on how he wanted the weapon to look, the anti-magic flowing and shaping with each turn of his fingers and each instruction from deep within his mind. The triangular point sharpened as he turned his fingers anti-clockwise. The tip of the long, shimmering rod glowed with an almost pearlescent quality as Alex held it in the air above him.

Still holding the shield steady around the bottle, Alex launched the icy spear with full force at the thrumming barrier, watching as it rebounded, the spear shattering into a million glittering pieces that fell to the ground in a shower of diamonds. The shield had held, protecting the object within. Alex grinned, feeling a trickle of sweat running down the side of his face from the exertion of performing two complex anti-magical tasks at once. He had focused his energies, and he had done it—he had performed two things at once, protecting and attacking at the same time.

It felt good, and he knew he had the notebook to thank for it. The ghosts of his heritage had steadied his hand and focused his mind. It occurred to Alex that Leander might’ve used those very skills on the battlefield, perhaps even in the final moments before the ambush that sealed his fate.

As Alex imagined the carnage, he felt a pull of somber empathy, and the shield around the bottle grew suddenly stronger, pulsing with a vibrant silver energy that rippled across the room in shimmering waves, like heat rising up from desert sands. The almost-liquid current undulated from the glittering barrier. His emotions, he realized, were tied to the fabric of his anti-magic, making it stronger and more potent, depending on how he channeled it and how keenly he felt that emotion.

Alex dropped the shield from around the bottle and set about attempting to make a barrage. He had done it by accident when trying to forge a shield for the first time, but wanted to see if it could be done more powerfully to create a useful tool in a fight.

The anti-magic swirled in the air as he lifted his hands and forged a ball of silver and black, the glinting sparks making the energy resemble a faraway galaxy. Alex slowly let the anti-magic slip back inside his body, one wisp at a time, feeling the peculiar sensation of it running through his veins, piggybacking on his blood, as he held it inside for a moment. Moving his hands sharply outward, he focused on the power of the barrage, his muscles tense, and released the fury of his anti-magic out into the cellar.