Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(19)
The tourists felt it, too; they stilled, heads cocked, hugging themselves as they glanced around uneasily.
“Did their heat for real just go bust out of nowhere?” Lumberjackhole muttered to his unfortunate partner, in the peevish tones of someone already composing a pissy Yelp review in their mind. “Because I didn’t pay out the wazoo for these tickets just to freeze my ass off.”
“I’m sure they’ll fix it, honey,” his companion said with a conciliatory pat to his arm, as if her Womanly Responsibilities included perennially talking this dipshit down. “It is pretty cold outside . . . maybe a pipe just blew or something?”
“They better have those refunds primed and ready, is all I’m saying.”
Then a silvery mist came creeping down the hall that led to the Grand Theatre, and the background music that I’d been hearing filtering from the matinee simply cut off.
“What the shit is that?” Lumberjackhole demanded, spotting the mist at the same time as I did. “Holy fuck, is that—Britt, does that look like snow?”
Suck though he did, he wasn’t wrong. The mist was indeed coalescing into crystalline snowflakes, small but so perfectly rendered they looked like flakes trapped under a microscope; minute, symmetrical wonders of points and spires, sparkling almost viciously bright, like the edges of keenly whetted blades.
As I watched in mounting horror—because this was most definitely not part of Yvain: The Knight of the Lion performance that had screeched to such a weirdly silent halt behind the theater’s gilded double doors—more and more snowflakes emerged from the mist, an entire lashing flurry of them.
A proper blizzard, except inside the castle.
“The hell is going on out here, Nina?” Gareth said, appearing beside me without warning; slightly out of breath, as if he’d run here at full sprint.
My older brother had been cleaning up his tiresome “rakish scion” act as of late, and part of this personal renaissance included spending more weekends working in his own office, a few doors down from mine. His management of our financial portfolio often intersected with my legal work, so he liked to have me nearby to yank in for help whenever a thornier issue presented itself. He must have sensed the abrupt and ominous shift in atmosphere, too, and followed it down here.
“Why is there a storm happening indoors?” he demanded. “Man, Gav had better not be on some other shit again.”
“I really don’t think it’s his . . .” I started to say, but the words withered in my mouth before I could finish.
The snowflakes had begun gathering, swirling around each other in unnervingly intentional little maelstroms, as if they were forming something with a distinctive shape. Something that emerged humanoid but crystalline, with elegant, spindly spikes in place of limbs, and long vulpine faces with eyes of faceted ice, distant ruby lights glimmering in their depths. The mist swathed around it like layers of tulle or gathering robes, as if the thing was wrapping chill air around itself like a garment.
Fear rimed my belly, a spreading frost. This was a creature that I recognized, though I’d heard of them only in stories—and as dire warnings about getting too cocky with your magic.
“Ice wraiths?” Gareth gasped beside me, blanching under his unlikely winter tan. “Are you shitting me right now?”
Ice wraiths were an elemental manifestation, one of the ways Blackmoore magic could go disastrously wrong if pushed too far, manipulated with too much force and too little finesse. When an elemental spell, even a simple one, got pumped too full of magical juice, it had an alarming tendency to go rogue—turning halfway sentient, occasionally even conjuring full creatures that identified closely with that element. Some were relatively benign, like chillsprites and snowbirds.
Others, like ice wraiths, not so much.
The Yvain musical production did feature a gorgeous winter scene, one of the few instances of magic embedded into its otherwise mundane but stunning special effects. It was precise and large-scale enough that usually my own little brother, Gawain—our musical director—cast it himself when it was time, rather than delegating it to another of the Blackmoores who worked with conjuring magical backdrops.
But this show had already run dozens of times this season, and Gawain had never fumbled it like this before. Why today? Why now?
It had to be connected to what had happened to me last night.
As Gareth and I stared, appalled, a second wraith appeared, followed by another, and another. They started vocalizing to each other like a hunting pack, in a litany of spine-chilling, high-pitched howls, like a gale whistling between alpine mountain peaks. The tourists had, at this point, twigged to the fact that something uncool—or, possibly too cool, so to speak—was transpiring in front of them. Something so uncanny, so divorced from the buxom wenches and chivalrous knights they’d been very reasonably expecting, that they weren’t totally sure yet how horrified they should even be. They began slowly backing away from the corridor where the wraiths advanced, about a second away from turning heel and running.
Then one of the ice wraiths rushed at a tourist in a whirl of scything claws—it gunned straight for the Lumberjackhole, as fate would rightly have it—and blew right through him like a winter wind. Leaving him frozen, encased in a thin, glittering shell of ice, his eyes behind it still alive but wide and unblinking.
“Oh, no,” Gareth exhaled beside me. I nodded mutely, still unable to speak.