The Potioneer (Shadeborn Book 3) (29 page)

And, when it was over, the Glassman merely clapped his hands together.

“Right, where was I?” he asked curtly, as if nothing had even happened.

Lily saw him then for the monster that he was, and she approached his mirror despite Novel’s weak attempt to pull her back. The illusionist was about a foot behind her, and Lily knew that he could do nothing now to protect her from what might happen next. Still, she had survived the Glassman’s curse right to its unexpected end, and he
was
still on the other side of the glass. And he had promised her a wish.

“What will you take from me to make Jazzy alive, well and able-bodied again?” she asked him.

“You wish your friend to walk your world?” the Glassman retorted.

“And to be
healthy
again,” Lily pressed, “to be free of whatever sickness you’ve cast on her.”

The djinn looked amused and affronted. He put a slender hand to his heart over the shimmering waistcoat.

“Me?” the Glassman asked. “I did not cause your friend’s sickness, Lily. You did. You fail to see the one who harms her, even now.”

“Irrelevant,” Lily snapped, “you can fix her, I know you can. Make her healthy and let her walk… and do what you like to me. I don’t care, so long as I’ve put my guilt to rest.”

The Glassman’s smile was wry. It collected in one corner of his pale, gruesome lips, and his bloody eyes sparkled with mirth and mischief.

“You abhor guilt, don’t you, daughter of shades?” he teased. “It eats away at you, to know that you have caused the torment of another.”

“Just get on with it,” Lily answered furiously. “Give me the terms of the deal.”

“Very well,” the djinn crooned. “I will do just as you request for your little dying human. But, for her to walk the world again, that ability must be taken from another.”

Lily looked down at her legs, still soaked from the splashing frogs in the pond, and she found that they were not quaking. If swapping lives with Jazzy was the way to make her able and healthy again, then there was no question as to how Lily would answer the Glassman. In fact, it all seemed a little too easy, especially since she would still have her magic to help her move, even when her legs were of no use. Lily thought for just a moment about the fable she had read before the air crash, but she could see no way that the Glassman could mean anything other than the terms which he had set.

“You’ve got a deal,” Lily said, bracing herself for the moment when she’d lose everything beneath the bottom of her spine.

But it was Jazzy whose wish came true first. A gasp from Lawrence alerted everyone to the miracle, as the girl in his arms suddenly woke with a start. She leapt from his and Baptiste’s secure grip, wide-eyed and uncertain, like she was still in the throes of a dream. Jazzy didn’t even seem to realise that she had landed on her feet, or that her petite legs were holding her up, until she took another step towards the place where Lily was standing. Then, the little Indian girl looked down, and gave a cursory sniffle.

“I seriously need my glasses,” Jazzy surmised, “because this looks unreal.”

Lily gasped, overwhelmed with joy for the sight of her friend restored to health and motion. She knew that whatever happened next and whatever her own fate was, everything would be all right. Lily could live with any sufferance she had to endure, just so long as her guilt for her friend’s livelihood had finally been quashed.

“Now for the exchange,” the Glassman said.

Lily stiffened, turning back to the horrid figure with a resolute expression.

“I’m ready,” she declared. “Take my ability to walk away.”

“I’m sorry?” the Glassman asked with a wicked grin. “But who said the victim would be
you
?”

An earth-shattering screech echoed through the cavern as the Glassman’s shining arm shot through the mirror. Mere seconds passed as he stretched his ethereal grip, straight past Lily’s waiting form, to grab Novel by the shirt-front. The powerless, weakened shade could only turn his face to a look of abject shock, before the Glassman gave a yank. Novel went flying straight through the glass in a flash of blood red light.

The Price

“NO!”

Lily pounded at the pane of the looking glass. She shot it with every power she had, from fire to lightning to deluges of water and blasts of wild air. She kicked and screamed and hollered, but it was all for nothing. Novel was on the other side of the mirror, and when he called to her, she couldn’t even hear him. It was her dream, the long-forgotten nightmare where her true love was weak and pale, separated from her by an invisible barrier that wouldn’t cease despite every effort she could make.

She had lost him.

“The cave’s collapsing!” Lawrence shouted desperately. “We’re all dead if we don’t get back through the portal!”

Lily could hardly hear the others pleading with her, she was too preoccupied with the sight of Novel on the other side of that unbreakable glass. He was in the World of the Wish, the world filled with those creatures who had formed the nightmares of shades for centuries and millennia, and Lily had been the one to put him there. When the Glassman had ended her guilt over Jazzy, he’d begun a whole new slew of regret that stabbed deeply at her heart. The monster was there, standing behind Novel, farther back in the world that Lily couldn’t reach, and now it was his turn to stand with his arms folded proudly.

“He will not walk
your
earth again,” the djinn cackled, “just as we agreed.”

Billows of black smoke came from nowhere on the mirror’s other side, and Lily watched helplessly as Novel was coated in something that formed a shroud. He was hidden from her as a kind of cloak enveloped him and forced him to his knees, whilst a shining set of silver chains wrapped themselves firmly around his wrists. She lost sight of him amid the shackles and the folds of the dark fabric, until there was only the vision of the Glassman filling the mirror again.

“I’ll get him back!” Lily screamed at the man in the mirror.

The Glassman only grinned.

“I’d love to see you try,” he whispered.

“Lily!” Jazzy shouted, and a second later she was pulling at her friend’s arm. “Didn’t you hear? The ceiling’s coming down! We need to levitate up to the surface and
you’re the only one with power
!”

“Save us!” Jeronomie cried as she joined them. “Lily! Save us please!”

The mirror was blank at last when Lily looked back to it, and all traces of Novel were gone. The dire fate of the other travellers became clear as Lily’s mind refocused on the cavern, which was shaking and falling apart all around her. In a rush of wild energy, she scooped Jazzy and Jeronomie into a gust of air and gravity, rushing them down the tunnel to follow where the others had already fled. They were only six now, and Lily felt that burden sorely as she lifted them one by one into the air before her.

When they were safely on the surface of their world again, Lily sobbed into the blackness of the night. There was a deep and echoing rumble from beneath the ground, and when Lily parted the dark pond with a rush of power that took all the water from its depths, she was horrified to see that the water column was no more. The portal to Gifter’s Cavern no longer existed. Novel was gone, and there was no way to get him back.

July

Desperate Times

“Pass me the pick,” said Baptiste, “I’ve hit another rock.”

Lily did as instructed, though her arms burned with strain to throw the pickaxe in the bloodshade’s direction. The sun had set an hour ago at the place where there had once been a pond full of lively frogs, and now two figures were alone in a pit that was easily ten feet deep. They had been digging for nights on end, for more than a hundred hours since Novel was taken from the cavern beneath the water, and so far, they had found no sign of where that collapsed tunnel ought to have been. Lily was using her powers to float mounds of earth up to the surface, and the strain was now so great within her veins that it felt as though she was doing the labour by hand rather than by magic.

“Dammit!” Baptiste cried, and the pick gave a clang in the same moment.

The bloodshade recoiled with a gasp, and Lily saw with horror that the impact of the pickaxe’s force had split Baptiste’s palm wide open. The gash in his skin oozed with dark blood, and Lily put a hand out at once to stem his bleeding. Her blood casting had been stronger than ever since meeting the Glassman, though her other powers felt weak from all the toil of trying to undo what the evil djinn had done. She had promised that she wouldn’t leave Massachusetts without locating that mirror where Novel had been stolen from her, and her look of resolution passed straight into Baptiste’s eyes as she stopped the bleeding in his hand.

“If it really was a portal,” Baptiste began with a hiss of pain, “then it might have moved somewhere.”

“I don’t have anywhere else to look,” Lily replied in desperation. “If you’ve got a better idea, then let’s hear it.”

The MC shot her a bitter look, for their own personal tensions were hardly healed, despite their joint effort to recover Novel.

“In all the years I knew him, Lemarick never spoke of the djinnkind,” Baptiste urged, “but he’s done so much searching for information with you. There must be another way to find that mirror.”

Lily paused in the dark pit that she and the bloodshade had dug out. She thought of the little silver box with the lens and the viewfinder, and its grim owner with his swirling golden eye. Pascal would know how to use the Spectrograph to locate more of the djinnkind, but he was murderous and wicked, and Novel had specifically told Lily never to trust him. She wanted to uphold that promise very much, but when Baptiste gave her an angry shove, it shook her to the core.

“Do you know something?” he pressed. “You look like you do.”

“I don’t know,” Lily answered, “it’d be risky.”

“Risky?” Baptiste repeated, his voice rising from a shout to a bark. He let Lily go and stepped back in the pit of dirt, his arms wide open with an unhinged grin on his pained face. His palm bled profusely as he threw it back towards Lily, punctuating his every word with drops of flying blood.

“If you
love
him, you’ll risk it!” Baptiste exclaimed. “Any hardship, any suspicion and any danger! You’d risk it all! You’d risk everything you had to bring that man back, if you loved him as much as I-”

The MC stopped himself, panting and looking shocked at his own outpouring of rage.

“Forgive me,” Baptiste panted, “I have spoken out of turn.”

He twisted away, his voice breaking with a sob in his apology, and Lily saw the truth behind his bond with Novel. She knew beyond all doubt, after the sacrifices he had made with Gifter, that Novel loved Lily more than anything in the world. But Baptiste, she now realised, loved
him
, and perhaps he even loved him just as much as she did. Their bond was more than blood on Baptiste’s side, and the MC’s shoulders shook with the force of his un-spilled tears as he stood, arms wrapped around himself in the darkness.

“You’re right,” Lily said softly. “Of course, you’re right. Give me ‘til the morning, and I should be able to do what needs to be done.”

*

When she closed her eyes to sleep that night, Lily found herself thinking of a man she had never desired to spare another thought for. His harsh, thin features, silver hair and mismatched eyes were all she focused on as her exhausted mind and body settled into sleep, and Lily hoped that somewhere on the other side of the world, Pascal Novel was lost to the depths of slumber. She didn’t want to need him, but now there was no choice in the matter. Dealing with a killer was the only way to track down her lost love.

When the Dreamstate emerged, Lily found herself in a room that, at first, was unfamiliar again. It wasn’t the Council Hall, but it was part of Pendle, and the smell of books filled her senses as she beheld a bed, a wooden rocking chair, and a great display case of artefacts along one wall of the small, cramped space. Pascal was sitting in the rocking chair, and when it shifted, the wisps of dreamlike air all around him blurred the scene a little. Lily approached him and stood beside the rocking chair, willing it to stop making everything so unclear.

“Any particular reason we’re in Forrester’s room?” Lily asked.

“Is that what this is?” Pascal replied, looking around with interest. “I’ve never been invited to the old hag’s inner sanctum.”

Lily looked at the dresser, where a glass display box lay empty and glistening. She knew what ought to have belonged inside that box, but something within her told her not to imagine the Diamondblade sitting there. She had kept the sword’s secret for all these months, and Pascal was not the man she wanted to reveal it to. She snapped her gaze from the empty case before the senior shade could question her about it, looking down at him with sorrow and fury.

“The Glassman took Novel through his mirror,” she explained, “and now we can’t find it, and I’ve no idea how to get him back.”

“If it’s any consolation,” said Pascal, “I think Lemarick was expecting this to happen.”

Lily raised a brow at the dark patriarch of the ancient shade house. Pascal rose from the rocking chair to face her.

“Why do you think I’m still sleeping on American time?” he asked Lily. “Before he kicked me out of the Imaginique, Novel asked me to stand by with a window to bring you home to England if everything went wrong. I’ve been trying to catch you to find out where you are for nights on end.”

“I haven’t been sleeping,” Lily confessed, her grief weighing heavy, even in her dream-body. She sighed, and found that she couldn’t meet Pascal’s eye as she continued to speak. “I’d like you to bring us home, and I need you to use the Spectrograph. I… I want to get through to the World of the Wish.”

“Cross over?” Pascal asked, and even his dry voice sounded awed by the prospect. “You know that means smashing down the walls between worlds? Breaking mirrors left, right and centre? And dispatching those who would seek to guard the passage from us?”

“I’ll risk it all,” Lily said, echoing the pain of Baptiste’s words earlier. “I’ll risk the fate of the whole world to get him back.”

Pascal grinned at that, and Lily hated him for it. He didn’t seem too hurt or upset by Novel’s plight, indeed he was excitable at the prospect of waging his war on the djinnkind at last.

“Tell me where you are,” he asked eagerly, “and I’ll bring a window in the morning.”

And Lily really didn’t want to give Pascal what he wanted, but she told him where to meet her, and sent him away the happiest darksider on earth.