Last Rites (Darkling Mage 6)

I grinned again. At least this time he kept the tiger.

Chapter 23

For the fifteenth time in as many minutes I pulled out my phone again, unlocking it, checking on my messages, but nothing. Herald hadn’t texted me back.

“I’m sorry,” was all I could r

eally think to send him. Stupid, I know, teasing him like that, but we’d always been up for a little friendly ribbing. I mean, I was new to all this, okay? I talk a big game about how handsome and ripped I am – both true, indisputable facts, mind you – but when it actually came down to brass tacks? Shit like that happened. And it hurt a little extra, too, because he was my best buddy.

But was that all I wanted?

“Dust,” Asher hissed. “Come on, man. You gotta focus.”

“Right,” I said, putting my cell away, cowing once more to the phone police. Then again, Asher was well within rights to snap me back to reality. It was time to start enchanting my mother’s amulet, and that was no small feat.

Carver had trusted me to do this on my own. Well, with Asher’s supervision, of course. He said that the best place to initiate the crafting of an artifact was one of personal importance, somewhere infused with emotional significance.

“The art of enchanting is, after all, closely tied to the ability and spirit of the one who enchants the object,” he’d said. “Infusing something with your arcane essence is a deeply personal and intimate act.”

And so there we were at Dad’s house. My house too, I guess. Not the one I grew up in, but because of all the framed photos of me, and Mom, and Norman Graves himself, natch, it was still steeped in memory, in sentiment. Perfect for the ritual.

That in itself wasn’t as complicated as I’d assumed. Dad had cleared out an area for us in the center of the living room, which basically involved pushing the furniture away so that we could sit on the rug. A circular one, too, which meant minimal work had to be done to consecrate the space.

We set the reagents out onto the rug. The lock of Nyx’s hair shimmered on a small square of silk. Asher produced the globular phial of anguish from out of nowhere, a glowing green orb of distilled pain.

“What’s that?” Dad asked, still so new to the arcane underground.

I coughed. “That’s not important,” I lied. “Frog juice.” He didn’t need to know what happened.

Lastly, I reached for my neck and lifted Diana Graves’s amulet up and over my head. Its chain snagged a little on my hair, like it didn’t want to go anywhere. I set it in the center of the rug, and its red garnet eye glared unblinkingly, like a challenge.

You may note that we were missing one of the reagents, and you would be correct. But Carver said that it might still work, even without the breath of the dying. Sure, the enchantment would fundamentally be weaker, and it would tax more of my spirit, but that still gave us one additional weapon to wield against the Eldest.

I took a long, deep breath, then nodded. “I think I’m ready.”

Dad dutifully dimmed the lights, taking his place at the far end of the room, quietly tipping a beer into his mouth, his eyes wide with anticipation. I shook my head and smiled fondly. This was definitely the right place to perform the enchantment.

I lifted Mom’s amulet to my chest, holding it up in both hands so that its jewel faced the ceiling. Izanami hadn’t provided us with any incantations for casting the ritual, and so I improvised, as I always did. It was down to intent, after all, imbuing your words and your actions with purpose. The words themselves didn’t matter. Thea, once a supremely powerful enchantress herself, had taught me that.

So I turned to the very first incantation I had ever used to cast a circle of summoning, an old classic that I’d partially memorized: the marketing copy off of the back of a popular brand of doggy biscuits.

“Puppy Yum biscuits are the perfect anytime treat for your furry friends,” I droned. “Made with only the best organic beef and lamb, Puppy Yum biscuits also contain mutt-friendly grains and fiber, for – ”

The garnet began to glimmer. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Dad with his mouth hanging open, the beer forgotten in his hand. I continued intoning, the words hardly making sense in relation to the process, but doing their work all the same. Give me what I need, I thought. Seal away the Eldest. Let this be the key that locks the door between our worlds.

That did the trick. The garnet shone brighter, growing warm in my hand, and a strange, stifled wind blew from beneath us. It smelled like almonds. Asher’s hair danced in the odd breeze, but his face remained staunch, resolute, his eyes reflecting the red light of the amulet.

The lock of Nyx’s hair lifted of its own accord, drifting gently in the wind, then settling into my hands. In a swirl of stars and night sky, her hair twinkled, then vanished, its essence absorbed into the amulet. Then the bottle of anguish unstoppered itself, and horrible screams – my screams – filled the house.

Asher clapped his hands over his ears, and Dad did the same, dropping his beer, his face etched with horror. He recognized my voice. He must have. But I pressed on, swallowing my fear and my remembrance of what Carver had tried to do to my heart. I watched as my own pain made liquid turned into a pale green mist, its vapors sucked into the amulet until the bottle, too, disappeared.

The screaming mercifully stopped. Asher brushed his hair out of his face, collecting himself, his breathing deeper, but Dad fixed me with a glare. He didn’t know what had happened, but he understood. I ignored him.

My eyes flitted back to the garnet as I pushed more of myself, of my very spirit into its spaces. We were just vessels, me and Diana’s amulet, and to grow its power I needed to pour more of myself in. But how much could this thing take? It fed, and it fed, burning so hot in my hand that I knew I had to let go before it scorched my skin away.

And then, just when it was too much to bear, the wind dropped, as did the amulet’s blazing heat. The garnet glimmered one last time, then went dead.

I squinted at the amulet. “Huh. Is that it?”