Not all of the blood that Evelina’s staff stamped in perfect circles on the sidewalk dripped down from her hands. Its braided black wood had split at the seams, trickling from crown orb to concrete, making it a slippery, unreliable way to try to balance her steps.
She shuffled along like a much older woman, keeping those steps as short and close to painless as possible. Something in her had given way with the collapse of the last barrier she’d tried to cast across the street. Something in the long curve she had learned to picture, through years of training that were about to fail her, running up from her pelvis and along her spine, tapering to a staff-like nub just below her lungs. A half-imaginary organ, the magical spring her staff drew from, and neither of them were supposed to be able to break.
Something between her spine and pelvis and lungs was too loose and liquid, shifting with each step like a ruptured organ. Glancing over her shoulder felt like a risk that could have spilled her over, torn that curve completely in two, but she had to see how closely the thing was following her.
The shadowy mass that had dropped its weight on her barrier with the devastating ease of a wave obliterating a sand castle. It dragged itself along by streetlamps, clutching each with a pop and shudder that killed their lights and pulled it forward through darkness. The long, undulating slug of its body wasn’t made to locomote in that world, to live in the physical, but as long as it could find some spark to feed on, it could resist the horrified natural laws that would vomit it back into the void it had come from.
Dragging itself along by sparks, it was slow, but so was she. And only one of them was running out of strength. With every step, the idea that she could drag herself to any sort of help was more laughable.
And with that long curve twinging and sloshing like internal bleeding against her spine, all she had left to cast from was the short curve, wishbone-fragile, between her lungs and palate. If she tried to speak a defence and the leech smashed it as easily, the backlash might kill her on the spot.
The best she could hope for was to make it far enough to warn someone. Wasn’t there a pay phone on that street? She must have walked past it a hundred times, who ever paid attention to that sort of thing anymore, but her phone had burned hot enough to brand her through her pocket while she’d held that last barrier, and when she’d managed to rip it free from the scorched fabric, she’d found its screen cracked through, shivering and shattering to the sidewalk in warped pieces.
Just a little farther. She wouldn’t have to say much. The right person would understand what had gone wrong from just a few words, and then she could think about what was bound to happen to her after she hung up the phone.
A throatless, smoking screech wrenched her gaze up from where it had trickled down to the sidewalk. Not from behind – not from the creature that had crashed through all her wards and pursued her in implacable silence. A car had burned rubber onto the curb just ahead of her, a bubbly white thing that had swerved out of fashion at least a decade ago, with the logo of a local taxi company emblazoned not quite straight on its side.
Even with death sucking light from the street behind her, she had to stop and gawk. To try to make her eyes and internally bleeding hopes comprehend the impossible stroke of luck that seemed to be parked in front of her, until the driver’s-side window descended in hasty, hand-cranked jerks and the woman who’d lurched her car up onto the curb leaned her wide, wild-eyed stare out into the sputtering light.
“Get the fuck in!” she barked, as smarting as a cattle prod swatted against Evelina’s slowing, bleeding will to move.
To live. She limped for the passenger door, just in time to catch it as the woman flung it open from inside. Her staff cluttered her attempts to turn and carefully lower herself onto the seat, slick and clumsy and alarming as a limb gone numb. Tangling with the others, clattering on the dash, but she found a way to fit both her and it, and the driver screamed the car away from the curb the second she did.
Momentum slammed the door on the trailing hem of Evelina’s robe, and she didn’t try to free it. Just leaned against the grounding cool of the window, of being alive somehow, letting it rock and lurch her as the taxi careened on the hell-for-leather course of staying alive for a while longer.
As the woman whipping it around those tight corners kept casting wide, wild glances at her and the rearview mirror, watching for the thing that surely couldn’t follow them fast enough now. The thing that no one without a spark of magic would have been able to see at all.
Just the sort of rough-handed woman who looked as if she’d been born as a twin to that car, that career. But her eyes had to hold that spark, to hold such fear as they looked back to Evelina.
“So, are you supposed to be some kind of witch?” she asked. “I hope you have some idea how to kill that thing, because I have no fucking clue.”