Wish Bound (A Grimm Agency Novel Book 3) (23 page)

And Mihail rose, the flesh on his head turning purple as it solidified. “Now you both die.” He raised a fist, to show off.

And stopped.

The thorns covering him had retracted, leaving only smooth, dead flesh.

“What spell is this?” Mihail turned to Gwendolyn, looking for aid she would never offer.

Wyatt sheathed his rapier. “Acupuncture. You’ll find your qi is blocked at several key points. You may find it difficult to concentrate, summon spikes, or perform sexually.”

And before Mihail could respond, Liam was on him, claws and teeth tearing, ripping, shredding. I’d seen Liam as a dragon before, but never like this. Never as the primal force of destruction. Mihail thrashed and screamed, but without his thorns, the monster prince was no match for the oldest curse in Kingdom.

When all the flesh was torn from Mihail’s arms, Liam pinned him down with both claws, and rumbled like a volcano. The river of flame that gushed out onto Mihail’s head continued until the stone beneath them glowed white-hot, and Mihail’s skin caught fire.

When Liam stumbled away, the remaining mass of flesh didn’t move. Lurching from side to side, Liam made his way back to Ari, coiling about her the way he once protected me.

Ari stepped away from him, one hand on Liam’s nose, and raised her other hand, beckoning to Gwendolyn. “I’ll take an old-fashioned dragon any day, Mother. Submit now, and I will forgive you. You are no match for me.”

Magic surged in on Gwendolyn, distorting the air around her. With a shriek, she channeled the power out. Waves of fire and ice burst from her palm.

Instead of blocking them, Ari pressed her palms together and held still as a blast of steam left her face damp.

Gwendolyn threw a bolt of lightning that practically greeted Ari like a dog meeting his master. Each spell took longer to build, and each seemed easier for Ari to block. I waited for Ari to actually do something on her own.

And waited.

Raising her hands, Gwendolyn surged with power, and when she opened her mouth, smoke billowed out. The cloud swirled out, separating into columns, which then solidified into snakes the thickness of fire hydrants. Her spell serpents lashed toward Ari, hissing.

From behind Ari a crevice opened, spilling red light and sulfur. A stream, a torrent of hellhounds burst from the ground, each dragging a serpent down to Inferno.

Gwendolyn leaned on her staff, her breath ragged, her eyes an ominous shade of yellow. “So you have learned it is not raw power which matters, and yet I can’t help but notice you take no action. Are you afraid of harming your dear sisters, my handmaidens?”

Of course. If Ari turned her spells on her stepmother, her sisters would suffer through the handmaiden’s bond the same way I did whenever Isolde was wounded.

“Let them go, Mother.” Ari spoke in a tone of quiet command.

“On one condition,” said Gwendolyn. “You agree to match spells with me.”

“No!” I shouted from the arbiter’s booth, drawing the ire of both. Ari obviously had more power than Gwendolyn. She probably had better spells too, so agreeing to a duel like this made no sense. Each of them would pick one spell, and only one, then pit them against each other.

“No handmaidens,” said Ari. “No interference. Just you and me?”

“One spell for each of us,” said Gwendolyn.

I had no doubt what spell Ari would be forced to use.

“I agree, Mother. Choose your spell. My decision is already made.” Ari bowed her head, concentrating, rippling with power.

The floor of the court beneath them erupted into crystalline walls, isolating them from the rest of the court. No force in heaven or hell could breach the barrier. Perhaps I could trap Isolde inside—or myself. If the handmaiden’s bond could not pass the wall, I might have a way to break free.

“Good.” Gwendolyn spoke in another voice. A dark voice, like a well of evil in a human skin. “I, too, have had a teacher.” The syllables that burst from her throat next could not have been spoken by human lips. They stained the air, as if sound became visible, a black mist that enveloped Gwendolyn. When it lifted, she could barely stand, her back hunched and twisted. Trails of blood dripped from her eyes.

Yellow eyes. Witch’s eyes.

“Mother, you’ve taken evil into your heart for nothing more than power.” A note of pity hung in Ari’s words. “Submit now, and I will let you go.”

Gwendolyn cackled, a noise like a dying rooster. “I have learned the spell of oblivion, as have you. We die together.”

“The only ritual I chose to perform was my marriage vows. And you can only learn my spell by traveling through the mirror, Mother, but I didn’t learn this from the Fairy Godfather.” Ari risked a glance to me. “You might say I learned it from Marissa.”

I stood, shocked into silence, trying to understand her meaning. Magic and I never got along. I once failed to pick a card, any card. I had scars from my attempt to use bottled spells. I was so worried about what Ari meant, I almost missed the shift, as Gwendolyn befouled reality with her magic.

The spell swept out from her, a tide of death, a wave of bones and beetles, the smell of the grave and the sound of closing caskets. Like a landslide of darkness, it rushed toward Ari, cracking the stone floor below, sloshing off the crystal walls.

The wave arced up, rising to near the ceiling of the court, and then hurled down at her.

Ari unleashed the spell she’d been casting, not out at Gwendolyn. Back onto herself. Light like a thousand flash photographs blinded everyone in the court, leaving me seeing only spots. Through the veil, though, I saw what she did.

As the well of death swallowed her, Ari became, for one shining moment,
possibility
. Like every choice, and every chance that could ever happen, all at once. She multiplied outward, becoming herself a thousand times over, from a thousand different choices. An Ari who never learned magic, an Ari who learned Seal Magic from her mother. An Ari wrapped in darkness from Wild Magic, and one dead, murdered by Prince Mihail on their wedding night.

Together, that universe of Ariannas combined their magic, snuffing out the darkness and death like a candle flame. When the darkness ebbed, only one Ari remained, the Ari I knew.

Gwendolyn fell, her dark ambitions destroyed.

The crystal barriers retracted, and the doorman approached Ari, then kneeled. “My queen, shall I have the evil one executed? Her use of Black Magic forswears my protection and violates Kingdom law.”

Ari looked at her stepmother, broken and twisted, and turned her back. “It is her choice. If she chooses death, I will not stop her. If she wishes to live, let her be bound to a shop for the rest of her life. My Kingdom has need of a witch.”

The doorman seized Gwendolyn by the wisps of white hair that remained on her head, dragging her down the hall toward an exit. When he’d left, the other queens approached, kneeling before Ari, one at a time.

“What is this?” asked the Black Queen, coalescing beside me in the arbiter’s booth. “A new challenger? Or an old one, grown wiser?”

“You said I could receive the oath—”

She chuckled. “I lied, Marissa. It’s what I do. Tell me what spectacle this is?”

“A new High Queen,” said Ari. “Though it appears there is a question as to your loyalty, Princess Isolde. Shall we settle it?” Ari walked toward the arbiter’s booth, her previously destroyed dress spreading behind her as wisps of magic coursed along it.

The court rose from their knees and fell behind Ari, some literally hiding in her shadow, some standing in solidarity, others out of fear of being left alone.

Ari’s confidence, her skills, her sheer presence told me what the outcome of this would be. “You’ll never beat her.”

“Silence,” screamed the Black Queen, and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. She turned back to Ari. “Kneel before me in your mother’s stead, and I will give you her power and more. Resist me and I will finish what I started the first time. My handmaiden cannot save you again.”

Ari looked at her with a look of pure disdain. “I have matched Gwendolyn’s power, I bear that of a seal, every seal bearer, and witch in Kingdom. We shall finish our duel of magic, Isolde. I challenge you. I want a rematch.”

Rage boiled on the Black Queen’s face, a scowl that looked like she would tear Ari’s throat out with her teeth, but I saw the fear that it concealed. The Black Queen, scourge of five hundred years, was
afraid
. She knew I saw it, her slit-like eyes darting to me, loathing me. “You are unworthy of the honor. Handmaiden, kill her.”

“I won’t do it,” I said. “I won’t kill anyone else for you.”

She hit me with the back of her hand, and I let her, let it split my lip and bruise my cheek. “You
will
.” Then her eyes flicked back and forth between Ari and Liam. “The queen or the dragon? Who shall I have you kill first?”

“Neither,” I said, and drove the dagger in my fist toward my chest. My body locked cold, frozen in place by her power.

The Black Queen began to giggle. “I
told
you I’d find what you feared most. I understand now, Marissa. Your boyfriend, your best friend. Who dies first?” She shrugged. “Leave the queen for later. My third command to you is given, darling. Slay the dragon.”

“No!” I cried, but the compulsion came upon me. I fought it with every fiber of my being. Every inch of my muscle and ounce of will I had. My feet moved at her command, dragging me forward out of the arbiter’s booth.

“Stop,” I said, begging the Black Queen for a mercy she did not have.

She ignored me, a look of shock and surprise on her face, one hand covering her mouth. She’d heard Fairy Godmother’s term for me. She
knew
.

My hands took the thorn sword from my side. The most I could do was make them tremble as I marched toward Liam. Then he began to change.

“No, don’t do that,” I screamed through clenched teeth, but he did. Scales melted into skin, his face grew shorter, and paler, until at last it was only Liam, and still I advanced.

“Run,” I said. “I can’t stop her.”

He looked at me with those brown eyes and smiled. “I know, M. It’s going to be okay. That’s her third command.”

I thought for a moment he had some spell. Some binding or trick, or
weapon
, and then I realized what he meant to do, and I screamed.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said. “I love you.”

Then I stabbed him. Right through the chest, with a strength beyond any I had ever known. I drove the thorns right up through him so they stuck out the other side, and then I tore it out, covered in his blood. Liam fell at my feet. Dead, by my hand, and the compulsion finally released me. I collapsed over him, finally free to cry the river of pain that came from my soul.

“Now kill the High Queen,” said the Black Queen. But the manacle on my wrist broke open and dropped to the ground.

I looked up at her, my pain mixed with rage, preparing to lunge at her.

Ari spoke in the silence. “As High Queen I order you stripped of your title, and the privileges that go with it. Does my court concur?” As she spoke the foundations of the castle shook and a hurricane blew through the room.

The doorman snapped into existence with a thunderclap, radiating menace.

Isolde’s eyes widened, a look of panic on her face. “Nocte.” With one word, she froze the court.

I no longer cared if I lived or died, so long as I took Isolde with me. With my hand on my bracelet I called him. “Grimm.
Kill her.
”

Plaster fell from the ceiling as the ground trembled.

Isolde whirled, looking everywhere. “Yes, Father. Come and insult me from your mirror, if you can even manage that. Taunt me and order your puppets about from the safety of the glass.”

The walls flexed inward, and every bit of glass in the palace exploded into a powdered mist. Grimm’s voice thundered in answer from the stone itself. “I come.”

A ray of blinding light leaped from Ari to the Black Queen, wrapping around her. In flashes through my left eye I saw her in her thorn tree form, struggling against Ari’s binding. In the center of the room a ball of light like a miniature sun began to grow. I had seen it before, when Grimm came to me, in Fairy Godmother’s realm. Grimm wouldn’t be coming through mirrors, or watching from a distance.

With a cry the Black Queen forced herself to stand. Then she held up her hands and began to chant, each word growing louder, each syllable gathering power. The sun in the room was so bright my eyes hurt with them closed. Then the Black Queen screamed:
“Nocte!”

A wall of darkness swept out from her, engulfing me.

I opened my eyes to nothing.

NOT COMPLETE NOTHING
. As the moments passed, my eyes adjusted. The room was not black, but the color of the world at twilight when the sun has just set. No sign of Isolde or the miniature sun that would have become Grimm. I knelt on the ground and tried to cradle Liam’s body, but I couldn’t move him. The same dark gray that wrapped everything else covered him as well. Finally I lay down on the concrete, stretched out beside the only man who had ever truly loved me, and I wept.

Time didn’t have meaning in that in-between place. I can’t tell you how long I lay waiting and wishing. At times I nearly slept, and at other times the tidal wave of grief receded far enough for me to almost be aware of where I was. It was one of those moments when I realized Grimm was standing behind me, watching, and waiting.

He looked like when I’d seen him in Fairy Godmother’s realm. A proper English butler, dressed in a perfect silk suit, with thick black glasses and silver hair. I looked up at him, gazing into those eyes, which sometimes seemed to be the color of rain, and sometimes that of grass in the field. I looked up and attacked. I leaped upon him, smashing, kicking, and screaming, but the skill that came with the compulsion was gone. I was only me.

He waited, not raising a hand to my blows, until exhaustion set in.

When I could no longer throw punches, I switched to flinging words. “This is
your
fault. If you had been here to begin with, Ari never would have been attacked. Liam wouldn’t have died. I wouldn’t have murdered him.”

Grimm didn’t answer until the sobs wracking me stopped. Finally he spoke. “That’s not all. Go ahead. Say it.”

“She’s your daughter. This is all your fault.”

“I know that, Marissa. There are not words to express my sorrow, or my guilt. I could not come until Liam was dead and you were free of Fairy Godmother’s compulsion.”

“You
knew
he was going to die?” My eyes blurred again and I clenched my teeth until they ground.

“Come with me, my dear,” said Grimm. He put his hand on my shoulder and I slapped him.

“I’m not leaving him. Go to hell, Grimm.” I tried in vain to move even Liam’s little finger, but the shadows wrapped around him held him like ice.

“This world is frozen. Paused, one might say. You cannot change it nor affect him in any way. Nor any of the others, for that matter.”

Others. I glanced around through tear-blurred eyes. Everyone still stood in the Court of Queens. Wyatt still cowered behind a podium. Ari’s hands were still in the air, her face focused as she wrangled magic. I reached out to touch her hand. I’d stolen marble statues less cold. “Are they dead?”

“No, my dear. They are
quelled
. To quell an entire realm has surely consumed all of the fairy power my daughter stole from Fairy Godmother. Even I never cast it on more than a town or forest at once, and that was only for a few hundred years so that the crop blight might pass.”

He put his hand on my shoulder again, and this time I didn’t fight it off. When he wrapped his arms around me I found, to my surprise, that there was still grief to be had. I can’t say how long it went on.

It might have been a hundred years later, or maybe a few seconds, when he finally let me go. “Will you come with me? Please?”

I did. I kept my eyes open as the world slanted inward like a box folding, and then outward again. We stood in the front office of the Agency, and the quell did not hold sway. The lights hummed and flickered like always; the doors opened and closed just fine.

Rosa, however, was missing. Grimm had always had a shelter agreement with her that against all disasters, she and her family would be safe. In her place sat the harbinger Death, filing papers and looking over applications. He rose and nodded to Grimm. Then he looked at me. “Is this is the point where you get angry at me, or attack me, or throw things at me? I didn’t kill your boyfriend.”

His words cut me like the thorn sword, as if I could ever forget that
I
had.

“This way, my dear,” said Grimm. “An audience awaits you.”

I followed him back to the main conference room. Inside sat a group of beings I had hoped never to see again. On one side of the table sat Eli, head angel in charge of the city. Across from him, Nickolas Scratch, leader of Inferno himself. On the other side sat Death. I hadn’t seen him come down the hall, but Death had a nasty habit of showing up. To his side sat the Fae Mother. I didn’t really understand what she was doing here. The others, well, they sort of fit in with the rest of my life.

Grimm walked to the head of the table. I took the seat at the end.

“So tell me, Marissa,” said Nickolas Scratch. “What exactly are you going to do to fix this?”

Eli leaned over to pat my hand. “Ignore my associate there. The Authority wanted me to tell you how sorry she is for this situation, and to relay her condolences. She says when your boy finally gets there, you can consider him spoken for.”

I glared at Death. “What do you
mean
,
when
he gets there?”

Eli held out his palms. “Seems like he missed his bus or something. Not to worry. Everyone gets there eventually.” He looked out the window, at the quell. “Now that, there, that’s nasty. No defense against it. Cuts straight to the soul, wraps it up.”

I can’t tell you what the Adversary’s answer was. My mind locked onto Eli’s words, going through them over and over, until my tongue finally birthed the question. “Grimm, why didn’t the quell affect me?”

In the city that never sleeps, you could have heard a pin drop. Or an asteroid drop, for that matter.

“I’m stepping out for some fresh air.” Eli backed out the door. “Nick, you want to come with me?”

Nickolas nodded and walked out as well, followed by the Fae Mother and the spirit of darkness who had once been my lawyer.

I kept my gaze locked on Grimm. “Why didn’t the quell affect me?”

Grimm kept his hands behind his back, as he looked out the window. “Do you know the meaning of your name?”

“Of the Sea. Answer the question.” I stood, pushing away my chair.

If he knew I approached, he didn’t react. “In Latin, yes. In Hebrew,
Mara
, meaning ‘bitter.’”

“Answer the question.”

Grimm turned, finally, and took his glasses off. “It has another meaning, as well. It means ‘wish child.’”

I knew I’d been adopted. Always figured I was yet another drug addict’s baby, given to my parents in return for who knows how much cash.

“The quell affects the soul, my dear. And while I can do wondrous things, I cannot make a soul.”

I held up my hands, looking at them, I can’t say why. “I don’t understand.” Grimm ran a series of orphanages just because “a baby” was a common wish. “I know about the orphanages. I signed the inspection reports when you were gone.”

Grimm sat down in the chair I’d just vacated, and rubbed his glasses on his sleeve. “I established my first orphanage twenty-seven years ago, Marissa. I don’t raise the dead. I don’t end the world, and until the night your parents came to me, I didn’t offer children. Ever.”

He gestured to the chair across from me. “Your father and his wife found their way through my wards the old-fashioned way—pure desperation. They showed up at fifteen minutes to six and, the moment I saw them, began begging for a child. In this day and age, we would say Clarisse had no viable eggs. All she knew was that she couldn’t have children. I turned them down, like everyone who wished for a child.”

“Yet here I am.” I didn’t sit.

“It was your father’s last words that struck home. He said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like. To want a child, to love.’ After he lost a fistfight with one of my agents, your parents left the office, and I remained. That night, once my employees left, I retreated to my demesne, and began to wonder. You might say I committed the worst mistake a fairy can.”

“Fathering an evil queen who kills anyone and everyone?”

He ignored my jab. “I let my mind wander. I asked myself, ‘What if?’ What if I hadn’t given my first daughter power? What if she’d been a normal girl, with no affinity for magic? What might have been?”

I shook my head. “There is no way on earth I’m your daughter.” The thought of it made me angry. No, anger paled beside this fury. I preferred being the child of a heroin addict than something like the Black Queen.

“Your genetic material is a combination of the blood your father left in the lobby and that of one of my most trusted agents. You are not my child, Marissa, much as I might wish it. You are my creation. Building a body, forming flesh, that is the easy part, like assembling a bookcase.” He saw the look on my face.

If my life had been any different the previous weeks, or if it had been one whit different from the moment I turned eighteen, I think I wouldn’t have believed. The thing was, part of me echoed with betrayal, and burned with the lies that made up my life. The other part nodded inside, like something I’d always known had been confirmed.

The how, the why of my body, those didn’t concern me. I’d settled those questions back when I thought I came from an orphanage. I spent six years asking myself who I was. It felt like longer, until I worked up the courage to ask. “What am I?”

“A woman.” Grimm didn’t meet my eyes.

It couldn’t be a lie, or I’d be lying dead from the thorn near my heart. But it wasn’t the truth either. “You can’t make a soul. Death told me that several times, and I think I understand why now.” As a matter of fact, so many things made sense now. Why the Adversary had turned down my attempt to bargain my soul for the end of the apocalypse. Why magic never obeyed my will. Why even the doorman at the Court of Queens couldn’t give me Mihail’s kingdom.

Why I couldn’t have children.

“Tell me. No more half answers. What am I?” I slipped into the chair, taking both of his hands, and waited until he finally looked at me.

“Isolde grew within her mother, nine long months, and in the normal manner, she took a tiny shard of her mother’s soul, and grew it into her own. You were formed complete. Alive, breathing, but without spirit to drive the body. You are a wish. Created by me, bound to flesh, and given to your father to raise.”

“You made a wish, just to put it into a body?”

“No.” He looked down at the table. “Long ago, a man came to me for a wish. Bitter at his ex-wife, he wished that she would never again be able to celebrate, as partying was her favorite vice. He died before he could collect and use his wish, but I kept it. Waiting.”

I bit my tongue. “And?”

“For guidance, I bound the wish to itself. It’s a subtle trick, one I suspect is quite similar to how the Authority created the first human souls. I swaddled it in the waiting flesh, and when the Agency opened the next day, I dispatched an agent to deliver you.”

“So that’s what Clara had against me.”

“Clara?” Grimm chuckled. “I didn’t take on Clara for another four years. Rosa carried you to your parents.”

Bile rose up in my mouth at Rosa’s name. “She knew what you did?”

“Rosa possesses a unique talent. She knows the true nature of everyone she sees, but I forbid that she tell you.”

Now I understood why Rosa never liked me. Why she treated me like furniture. Worse than furniture. The taste of bile in my mouth became stronger. No wonder she detested me. “You let Ari be attacked?” A second later, its companion followed. “Liam
died
.” I threw off his hands, pulling mine back. “You could have stopped this, and Ari wouldn’t be quelled. Liam would still be alive.”

“Not without harming you.” A tear formed in Grimm’s eye and rolled down his cheek, sparkling gold.

“And that matters? I’m not a person. I’m a
thing
. Another of your experiments. You let people die to keep me safe, Grimm. Beth died. I
killed
Liam, and he chose to let me. You think he would have made the same decision if he knew?” My shouts echoed in the hallways.

Grimm looked up at me, any sign of contrition gone. In fact, his rigid shoulders spoke of rage. “This is
exactly
why I did not tell you. And both of the people closest to you knew exactly who and what you were, Marissa.”

When I spoke, my voice came out like a whisper. “How?”

“Arianna’s spirit sight can see through your very flesh. She’s known since you two traveled to the focus point. Liam came to me two years ago, looking to make a deal of his own. I make you able to have children, he would serve me. He threatened to find another fairy if I refused. If you think it mattered to them one bit, you didn’t know either one. As I told them both, I feared that knowledge of your exact nature would make you value your life less. You would make dangerous choices, needless sacrifices.”

“Get out.” My gun couldn’t harm him, but I swore I’d beat him with my fists until he shut up.

“My leaving won’t bring Liam back. Now you understand why I no longer grant wishes. I’ve seen what they can become, and couldn’t bring myself to create them, just to die for someone’s whim.”

Somewhere, a part of me recognized that Grimm spoke the truth. At the same time, I couldn’t accept it. Couldn’t hear any more. I rushed for the door, leaving everything behind, dashing through an empty lobby and down the stairs.

I ran every morning, six miles, and the ritual had hardened my body to my will. And what I willed it more than anything was to take me away. I don’t know how many blocks I covered before I stopped, but it wasn’t because my side ached or my lungs burned like fire. I ran through a city of dark gray ghosts, in a world of absolute stillness.

No matter how far I ran, I couldn’t get away from the thing I most needed to escape. Me.

I stopped because no matter how far I ran, no matter how fast I went, I was no farther away than before. That, and the sound of moving metal caught my attention. A low, grating, creaking sound, among a world of gray.

I wanted to find a place to curl up and sleep. To forget about everything that had happened. Everything that I’d learned. Problem was, I wanted to find out what was making that noise. So I wiped my eyes, caught my breath, and walked out into the frozen city, listening.