Authors: Kristine Grayson
Young Gregor’s cheeks turned a light pink. It was the first color he had shown since Jodi started working on him.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Access the memory,” Blue said. “Is it there?”
He was asking with a bit too much hope. He wanted the memories gone more than anything. But he also knew that the memories were the only real tangible thing about the evil spell—tangible to him, at least.
Young Gregor was frowning. Then the frown grew deeper, and he let out a small sigh. “I—you—it’s not the same,” he said after a minute.
“What’s different?” Blue asked.
“This is going to sound weird,” Young Gregor said. “I remember having the memory. I even kinda remember the memory, like you do when someone tells you what happened. But I can’t access the memory. At all.”
“Try the others,” Blue said.
Young Gregor kept frowning. He rubbed his temple. His head was clearly hurting him.
Jodi took his hand and pulled it down. “That’s enough,” she said. “You can’t access it.”
She sounded both convinced and relieved.
“What you did worked,” Blue said to her.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Why would the memories go?” Young Gregor asked, not like he wanted them back, but more like a man who couldn’t believe his good fortune—a man who didn’t want to believe his good fortune, not right yet, at least, in case he might be disappointed.
“They weren’t yours to begin with,” Jodi said. “They belonged to the spell.”
That sentence chilled Blue. “How can a spell have a memory?”
“It’s not a standard spell,” Jodi said. “That’s what we missed. It’s a parasite spell.”
Blue rocked back on his heels, nearly lost his balance, and had to sit down. A parasite spell. And he’d had the damn thing for centuries. How big was it? And how hard would it be to dislodge?
If it was anything like a physical parasite, the older they got, the stronger they got. And the more they had woven their way into their host. He knew of some physical parasites that, once they were in place, they couldn’t be removed without killing the host.
No wonder Jodi had been worried.
She was watching him now. She understood exactly what he was thinking. She had probably been thinking the same thing.
“Did you know that before you tried this?” Blue asked.
She shook her head. Of course she didn’t know. If she had known, she would probably not have tried.
“So, I had the spell’s memories?” Young Gregor asked. “It was an actual thing?”
“It had a life of its own,” Jodi said.
“What was that, then, that appeared to those women?” Young Gregor asked, his voice trembling. “Was it me under the influence of the parasite?”
“It was another part of the spell,” Jodi said. “It had several forms. I’ll have to look it up, but I suspect that it can exist in more than one level at once. And it uses some kind of raw emotion to go after the women.”
She spoke so dispassionately, as if she wasn’t one of the women it went after.
“And then creates what?” Blue asked. “Some kind of avatar?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Jodi said. “But what I saw—”
She was looking at Young Gregor now.
“—was spiderlike, sending little tendrils out around it, weaving them into your aura.”
The description made Blue queasy. That was in him? Now? And had been for centuries?
“Some of the pieces of it got onto the floor there,” Jodi said, nodding toward the kitchen area. “Maybe it could send out pieces of itself. I’m not sure. I seem to recall that some parasite spells can do that, send out little branches of themselves to enact the point of the spell.”
“Oh, wow,” Young Gregor said.
Oh, wow is right
, Blue thought,
and
not
in
a
good
way.
Then Young Gregor looked at Blue with an expression filled with pity. “You still have yours.”
Blue nodded.
“And it’s centuries old.”
Blue nodded again.
“Jeez,” Young Gregor said. “No wonder you wanted to work on mine first. Getting rid of mine knocked me cold, and I’ve only had it for a year or two. What’s going to happen to you?”
“I have no idea,” Blue said. Then he took a deep breath, gathering all the strength that he had. “But I’m willing to find out.”
Chapter 46
“Well, I’m not willing to find out,” Jodi said. Blue had never seen her look quite this stubborn—or quite this scared.
She sat on her knees next to Young Gregor. He still had his head braced against the couch. The coffee table had moved out a little, probably from his fall, and some newspapers had fallen off onto the floor.
Jodi’s green eyes were wide, her mouth in a thin line. She was breathing shallowly, and Blue could tell she was fighting back some emotion, but he couldn’t tell what it was. Anger? Fear? A combination of both?
He wasn’t certain.
“You’re my only hope, Jodi,” he said softly. “I suppose I could go back to drinking, but I don’t think that’ll stop this new round. I don’t think that’ll save you.”
“What’s that?” Young Gregor asked.
“Not important,” Jodi said.
“Very important,” Blue said. “She’s in the cycle. This thing has targeted her now because of me, and I think she could die.”
“No.” Young Gregor grabbed her hand. “You can’t die. What’ll happen then?”
Jodi looked over at Blue. Her auburn hair fell so that it shielded her face from Young Gregor, and she rolled her eyes.
But Blue wasn’t so dismissive. He understood exactly how Young Gregor felt—with a huge dose of added guilt and a lot of fear.
“It’s my call,” Blue said, “and I’m willing to take the risk. Otherwise, neither of us has a life.”
Jodi took a deep breath. “I’m not sure what we’re facing,” she said. “It could be just like Young Gregor’s spell here, in which case we’re dealing with something relatively small, or it could be the mother of all parasite spells, and we could all die.”
Blue waited. Young Gregor was actually biting his lip.
“Let’s take this to the Archetype Place, tell Selda what’s happening, and have a team around us,” Jodi said. “This is so big, she might not want to handle it either. She might send us to the Kingdoms—”
“I don’t want to go back to the Kingdoms,” Young Gregor said. “I got infected there.”
Blue looked at him in complete shock. Young Gregor seemed oblivious to the look. He seemed oblivious to all of it. Apparently, he thought he was part of the team now.
And who could blame him, really? He had been the first step in all of this, the first experiment, the beginning of the end.
“You didn’t get infected there,” Jodi said a bit too dismissively. She was so scared she clearly wasn’t tolerating any crap. “It’s not like some Greater World parasite that you pick up from drinking bad water. It’s a spell, an evil spell.”
“That someone cast on me—cast on
us
—in the Kingdoms,” Young Gregor said, waving his hand at himself and at Blue. “Whatever it is that caused this, it lives there, and it wants to hurt us, and I don’t want to go near it.”
“We’ll keep you on assignment here,” Blue said before Jodi could speak again. “It’ll all work out.”
Young Gregor let out a large sigh of relief. Then he gave Blue a puppy-doggish look. “You’re a lot more courageous than I am.”
“No,” Blue said gently. “I’m a lot more desperate.”
“I don’t like this, Blue,” Jodi said.
“I don’t either,” he said, “but what choice do I have?”
He deliberately didn’t use the word “we,” because he wanted to let Jodi off the hook. Selda probably knew other chatelaines who could do this work, and maybe there was other magic that was equally suited to taking on parasitical magic.
Jodi nodded, clearly distracted, and then she stood, wiping the dirt off the legs of her jeans. She extended a hand to Young Gregor.
“Let’s see if you can stand,” she said.
“I’m okay,” he said and levered himself up slowly, like an old man, using the couch and the coffee table to steady himself. He paled as he got up.
“Dizzy?” Blue asked.
“No,” Young Gregor said. “I’m just sore everywhere.”
Blue half envied him. Blue wanted to feel the aftermath of ditching that parasitical spell. He wanted to be free.
Jodi had walked over to the kitchen chair where she had left her purse. She reached inside it. “I’ll call Selda and let her know that we’re on our way, and what I’m planning to do.”
Then she looked at the phone. She pushed on it a few times and swore.
“Not working?” Blue asked.
“It looks like the magic in the room blew it out,” Jodi said.
Blue glanced at the microwave. The digital clock/timer didn’t seem to be working. And there was no little light at the bottom of the flat-screen television set either.
“Looks like all the electronics are gone,” Blue said.
“Oh,” Young Gregor said, “the manager is going to hate that.”
“Just pay the hotel for it,” Blue said. “Offer double what everything’s worth. They always listen to that.”
“You sound like you know,” Young Gregor said.
“You have no idea,” Blue said, not wanting to think about everything he had ruined in the past.
Something thudded in the bedroom. Jodi whirled.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
Blue nodded. He was the only one who hadn’t stood yet, and he did so now, slowly, moving out of the way of the coffee table. Jodi headed toward the bedroom door.
“Don’t,” Blue said to her. Something felt off.
She stopped and looked over her shoulder. Young Gregor stood silently between them, like a scared bunny. His nose almost seemed to be twitching.
Then the bedroom door slammed open.
“How the hell does anyone stand that stench?” A thin man with a hooked nose stood on the pile of dirty clothing. He kicked some of it aside so that he could walk out of the room into the living area.
Blue had never seen him before.
Or had he?
The eyes looked familiar. They were black with a bit of amber in them.
“Who are you?” Young Gregor asked, his voice trembling.
“Get back,” Jodi said to him, as if Young Gregor had moved forward. He hadn’t, of course. He wasn’t that courageous.
“So you recognize me, do you, honey?” the thin man asked.
“Actually, no,” Jodi said, somehow making herself look taller. “I’ve never met you, but I’ve been looking at your nasty little spells all day.”
“They’re not little, sweetheart. If they were little, you wouldn’t be afraid of them.” He smiled sideways.
Blue’s heart was pounding. This was the man who had hurt him. This was the man who had destroyed his life.
And Blue didn’t recognize him either.
“I’m not afraid of them,” Jodi said.
“Who
are
you?” Young Gregor said again. Obviously, Young Gregor wasn’t the brightest candle in the chandelier.
“Now I’m hurt,” the man said. “Of all the people in this room, Young Gregor of Kent, you’re the one who should recognize me. After all, you saw me the most recently.”
“I don’t—oh my God,” Young Gregor said. “You’re the bad guy.”
The man shrugged. “If that’s how you want to play it, then yes, I’m the ‘bad’ guy.”
And Young Gregor started to scream.
Chapter 47
He wasn’t obviously hurt, and yet he was screaming. Jodi turned just enough so that she could see Young Gregor. He looked terrified. But Jodi didn’t see anything wrong in his diminished aura, nor could she see any magic trailing from this horrible thin man in front of her to Young Gregor.
Young Gregor was a screamer, that was all. He had the courage of a gnat.
“You’d think that a princeling would have better manners,” said the horrible thin man. “But he’s always been a bit overly dramatic.”
Jodi’s gaze narrowed. The horrible thin man had high cheekbones, a hooked nose like a cartoon villain and very thin lips, which she assumed weren’t natural. He had probably worn his lips down by pressing them together disapprovingly for so long.
He had an amber aura as well, but it wasn’t that sickly color that she had seen in Young Gregor’s aura. It was a deep amber, the color found in nature, rich and fine. It was also sparking with incredible energy.
This horrible thin guy was one of the most powerful mages she had ever seen—in the most traditional way. He could conjure up anything, whip up any spell he wanted, wave an arm and create something or destroy it.
She was terribly overmatched.
“So,” Blue said from behind her. “You’re the one.”