The Conjurer (The Vine Witch #3)(54)
“You have to be wondering if the end will be worth the cost,” she said.
But she was wrong. He was long past the frivolous notion of balancing one outcome against another. All he wanted was to be finished with the charade. Then he would stand in the headwind of the consequences and hope he remained on two feet as a man again.
The creature seemed to intuit his guarded emotions, as if drawing them out into the open with her breath. “Anger is just another energy on the spectrum of emotions,” she said. “Forgiveness another. You’ll know soon enough which end you’ve been stuck on.”
She laughed and cracked her whip in the air until it splintered like thunder in his ear.
“And you?” he asked. “Will you be satisfied?”
“All debts will be paid.” She exhaled, and some of the tarnish around her wore off so that he could almost look her in the eye. “It is a peculiar sort of magic, though, this wishing. The way it manifests, swirling through the cosmos like the tail of a comet. Such a fierce desire to be realized. Lives colliding, separating, and reforming again as each stage progresses.” She extended her bony finger, stirring the invisible air so that a trail of stardust formed a tiny whirlpool of sparkling light at her fingertip. “Pooling in odd little eddies of commonality, tugging at filaments of swirling light that are somehow interconnected.” She flicked the whirlpool into dust with her finger, letting it whoosh away on the breeze. “No care for the damage left in its wake while the recipient is granted their heart’s desire.”
“That’s how wishes work.” And even as he said it, the painful truth rattled through him, knowing he, too, may end up as collateral damage scattered on the wind. “That’s why they’re precious and not to be wasted.”
The creature seemed satisfied that she’d made him flinch, at least emotionally. “I will intervene if blood is to be spilled. I never agreed to that.”
And yet death doesn’t require blood. One should not be so careless with their words. “I understand,” he said.
The storm drew closer, building in height and width. He was certain the cloud was big enough to swallow the whole of the little village. And still the inhabitants slept as though . . .
It was only then he realized what an odd thing it was to see no one about on the streets. No baker to open his shop, no lamplighter out snuffing the flames, no street sweeper clearing the gutters of debris. No alarm raised. Certainly, the storm occluded the low angle of the sun, but it was still light enough out to signal the dawn. He raised up on his haunches.
“What is it?”
“Do you smell that? Lavender tainted with witch’s words.”
The creature stood, her nose in the air. “And fairy blood.”
He swung his head around to see if she was serious.
“There,” she said, pointing. A yellow car rumbled into the lane below. “They’re casting a sleeping spell.”
The pair peered over the roof’s edge and sniffed. “Yes, that’s the stuff,” said the creature as a string of saliva dripped from the corner of her tiny mouth. “What dreams shall be born this morn?” she wondered aloud as her eyes lit with greedy mischief.
He cringed, watching this midwife of dreams out of the side of his eye. None he knew ever spoke of her except for when the dream turned caliginous and sour, forcing one to wake in the middle of the night with the sheets twisted around their legs as they lay in a fretting, soaking sweat. The midwife of nightmares was more apt.
“I could change back, if you prefer,” she said. “But we agreed it would be more effective if we each took our alternate forms. Less risk of being spotted and derailing the task at hand.”
Curse this witch. The way she eased in and out of one’s thoughts was unnerving. He actually felt a pang of sympathy for the mortals whose minds he’d entered for a bit of fun.
“The wish is almost completed, and then you can do as you like,” he said and trotted off to the corner of the roof to watch the yellow car wind around the building. He understood what Yvette and Camille were attempting. A noble effort, at the very least. They might not save any lives, but at least the mortals wouldn’t suffer. He wished he could say the same for the rest of them as the first harsh winds of the coming storm ruffled through his fur.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A battering wind hit the building, shaking the walls and whistling under the eaves. The haboob was nearly upon them. Elena opened the shop door to gauge how much time they had before the worst of it arrived. Thirty minutes? Five? A train whistle sounded in the distance, screaming through the air like a wild animal trying to outrun a predator. Panic pumped adrenaline through her limbs, knowing Jean-Paul was aboard the train and on a collision course with the storm. What was he thinking leaving the vineyard after he’d only just woken from his fever? But she knew why he’d done it—to find her and make sure she was safe from Jamra. She would have done no less for him.
And would do so now.
Sand pelted the terra-cotta roof tiles and the windows. But the protection spell seemed to be holding. Not a single grain of sand entered the shop while she studied the sky through the open doorway. It was something, however tenuous, in the face of the stacked cloud of sand bearing down on them.
Elena shut the door and took one last look at the pages of her grimoire, hoping to find some spell strong enough to protect a moving train without injuring everyone on board. There were illusions and halting spells, but they were meant for stopping people, not twenty-five-ton locomotives barreling toward a village at forty miles per hour. So, if she couldn’t stop it, her only option was to meet the train at the station and somehow get everyone back up the hill to the safety of the shop before raining sand inundated the streets. Which meant leaving the protection of Yanis’s spell.