Penumbra (Darkling Mage 0.50)

The smile vanished from Thea’s lips as quickly as it had come. “There’s no easy way to say this. For all intents and purposes, Dustin, tonight, you died.”

Cold dread washed across my body, the hairs on my forearms standing on end. Is – is that really what happened? Thea was all in white, as was the room, and there was the halo of her hair. Was I –

“Am I in heaven?”

Thea’s eyes went wide, and she laughed again. “No, not at all.” Her mouth quirked, and she chuckled. “Heavens, no, if you’ll forgive the pun.”

“Look,” I said, exasperation starting to work its way through my blood. “You’re speaking in riddles and I can barely understand what’s going on, or what’s even happened. Just tell me what the situation is, please.” And the sooner I find out, I thought, the sooner I can get out of here.

Thea seemed to detect that exact train of thought, and she shook her head, the smallest, subtlest of gestures. “That won’t do, Dustin. Legally speaking, you are dead. The authorities raided that gang of thugs who picked you up and – ”

“Slow down. Thugs? Didn’t seem like thugs to me. That wasn’t a mugging.”

She nodded. “And you’d be right for thinking so. It was a cult. Crazed men and women who thought that their actions would help them somehow, that spilling an innocent’s blood would change the world.”

I looked down at my chest. “Change the world how?”

She shook her head. “That, I do not know, only that they felt it necessary. After the raid I can only assume that the authorities found your body and extracted you from the scene of the crime. You were in a morgue when my people found you.”

“Wait,” I said, my throat suddenly feeling like it was closing up. “Wait. You’re telling me there was a mistake, that people – like, actual professionals – thought I was dead and locked me in a freezer? And what do you mean ‘your people?’ I don’t. I’m confused.”

Thea took a deep breath, like this was the sort of thing that took the most explaining, that this was the part of the sales pitch where most people got up and walked away. “The knife – the dagger that they used on you was some sort of enchanted artifact. It didn’t kill you. It injured you grievously enough, to be sure, but it was used specifically to bewitch your body, to make the casual observer – even one who is medically trained – believe that you were dead.”

I shook my head, almost forgetting about the pain tugging at my chest. “How is that even possible?”

Thea looked around the room, then down at her thumbs. With a sigh and a slow blink, she turned her eyes on me and said the single word that was to change my life forever.

“Magic.”

Chapter 4

I blinked at Thea, unsure of whether to shout her down or laugh, of how to react to the wet sincerity in her eyes, the earnestness of her response. She wasn’t joking. Magic. Then the man who bound me with the leather straps with a word, and the way the fires from every candle leapt as they chanted, the dagger itself. Magic? Really?

No. No. None of it made sense. My mind whirled with the possibilities, weighed down with the gravity of more impossibilities, and I responded the only way I knew how.

“Bullshit.”

Thea didn’t flinch at the word, wearing the face of a professional who seemed to have gone through this same script countless times. “It is what it is, Mr. Graves.” I didn’t miss the sudden reversion to formality. “Our people – the Lorica, that is – are devoted to helping people like you. Victims of magic-related crime.”

“The Lorica.”

“Yes. It means armor, and it describes what we do: protect both the normal world and the arcane underground. The Lorica is the body, and we are its limbs and its organs, the component parts, each specializing in a different field of magic. And it was our specialists who found you.”

“Specialists.”

She nodded. “Our Eyes.” I noticed the way she emphasized the word, noted the capitals. “Surveillance. They picked out the traces of magical energy from the botched attempt to, ah, sacrifice you, and found your body stored at the Valero morgue.”

“Okay. Sure. Then I suppose your people waved their wands when they found me, and they magicked my corpse all the way here, where you brought me back to life.”

She flinched that time. “Not as such. Once we confirmed your location, we sent in Hands to retrieve you. Assisted by Wings, of course, to help extract you safely, and to ensure the Hands themselves had a smooth excursion.”

Eyes. Hands. Wings. And the body, the Lorica. What the hell was she even talking about? I threw the covers off my body, gritting my teeth at the blasting pain of merely moving my arm, but resisting because that was all part of the flourish, of demonstrating that I was done with this shit.

“So,” I said. “Thank you for your help. I appreciate all the magicking you did to get me out of there, and” – I gestured at my chest – “whatever it is you did to hold my insides together.”

She scratched the side of her nose. “We don’t do quite as well with mundane medical work, you see.”

“Sure,” I said. “But thanks all the same. I’ll just be seeing my way out of here if you don’t mind.”