Prophecy of Magic Read online

  Then Kit-the-dragon seems to disappear. I panic for a second, but then I see she just turned back into her usual shape.

  Is that a good or a bad sign?

  She still has the wounds she received as a dragon, and is still lying there without any sign of life.

  A squadron of cockatrices direct their deadly stares at the wounds of the green dragon who hurt Kit, while Nero roars viciously and blows a mighty fire breath that incinerates the red dragon on the spot.

  Done with vengeance, Nero dives down like a falcon.

  Reaching the ground, he turns back into his human form and grabs Kit in that signature bridal carry he’s practiced on me.

  “Hold on,” he says soothingly to her, then blurs into a too-fast-to-track run in the direction of the tent.

  His army parts for Nero like the Red Sea did for Moses.

  After their leader passes through their ranks, everyone begins to fight even more viciously.

  Supporting the ground troops, the cockatrices attack the remaining dragons with greater fury, their death glares crisscrossing the sky like lasers at some surreal concert.

  Approaching the tent with Kit in tow, Nero shouts, “Phase two!”

  Smirks appear on the faces of Nero’s allies as a new surprise comes out of the forest.

  It’s an army of human soldiers that look eerily like the bad guys—same armor and everything—but they’re led by the strongmen and are looking angrily at what’s left of the wounded dragons in the sky.

  Looks like some soldiers not only laid down their arms after the last battle but actually switched sides.

  I bet Nero’s truth-telling came in handy that day. He would’ve made sure they had no other agenda before letting them join his forces.

  Seeing yet another turn for the worse, the enemy dragons farthest from the action begin to flee.

  Nero enters the tent and faces Isis.

  Oh yeah. I didn’t see her on the battlefield.

  Was she hiding out here? Why?

  “You think it worked?” Isis asks.

  “Heal her,” Nero says instead of answering and gently lays Kit on the map. “No time to talk.”

  Nodding, Isis shoots Kit with her energy, and Kit’s grievous wounds start mending immediately.

  I wish I could jump up and down in glee.

  Kit is going to be fine—especially if her disturbing moans of pleasure are anything to go by.

  “Now sell it.” Isis nods at the tent entrance. “Be wrath.”

  Nero nods gravely and storms out of the tent, an expression of grief on his face.

  Huh?

  What’s that about?

  With no time to ponder the mystery further, I observe as Nero turns into his dragon form and roars something that sounds suspiciously like, “You will pay for that.”

  What few enemy dragons remain in the sky literally tuck their tails between their legs and fly away.

  Instead of giving the dragons chase, the cockatrices swoop down to use their gazes and claws on enemy troops.

  Nero doesn’t chase anyone either. Instead, he trims the enemy ground troops with his breath.

  Yet no matter how many losses they take, there are still too many human soldiers remaining.

  Realizing this too, Nero roars something, and the woman who controlled the animals the last time steps out of the forest, followed by a whole army of creatures with sharp claws and even sharper teeth. With a gesture, the woman sends her critters at the enemy army, then touches the snake-like coral stuff on the ground and concentrates.

  All of a sudden, the tentacle-like things stop avoiding enemy soldiers and begin to grab them by the ankles instead—which gives Nero’s army yet another huge advantage.

  The human army takes unimaginable losses, and the tide of battle begins to turn—but just barely.

  “Phase three!” Nero roars, and human soldiers appear from all sides of the clearing—surrounding the enemy army.

  “Surrender!” the giants shout through their massive throats.

  “Surrender!” Vlad and the strongmen yell as they deliver deadly blows.

  “Surrender!” Nero’s dragon roar also seems to say, right before he spews hellfire yet again.

  “Surrender!” the centaurs growl.

  “Surrender!” the human part of the army screams. “Join the true heir of our world.”

  And it seems to work.

  One by one, the enemy soldiers lower their weapons and kneel on the ground with their hands behind their heads—

  I’m back in the real world, and it takes me a few moments to reorient myself. I’m in a car with Nostradamus and Lilith, on the way to see Lucretia—and all this adrenaline in my blood is thanks to Lilith’s driving.

  I must say, seeing Nero win that battle was awesome. But what worries me now is that it was the last “safe” battle as far as Rasputin’s visions go. What if—

  “So did your little seer test succeed?” Lilith asks when she sees me open my eyes—doing so by looking at me instead of the intersection she flies through, nearly killing a nice old lady and a poodle.

  “I think so,” I say, mostly to get her looking back at errant pedestrians. “Then again, I didn’t see any proof that the events I saw in my vision will transpire exactly a day from this moment.”

  “You managed to target a day into the future?” Nostradamus whistles. “Most seers only have enough power to work with seconds when they first try this out.”

  Great. That would’ve been useful to know before I did the test.

  Oh well. Let’s just hope I didn’t use up too much of my seer mojo with that day-away targeted vision. There’s still plenty I’d like to foresee, starting with Nero’s final battle.

  Before I can return to Headspace, we take a nauseatingly sharp turn onto Brighton Beach. Storefronts begin flashing before my eyes. Though I can read the Russian names now, they pass by too quickly for me to actually register them.

  Two seconds and ten gray hairs later, the Ferrari screeches to a rubber-burning halt.

  Amazed to be alive, I unbuckle my safety belt.

  “Thank you, Nostradamus.” I turn around to look at him. “You too, Marius.” I smile at the shaggy beast. “And especially you.” I look at Lilith, who’s grinning like the Grinch.

  Opening the passenger door, I stumble out of the car on unsteady legs.

  Lilith exits as well.

  “Maybe I forgot to mention, but this meeting is with my therapist,” I tell her. “So it’s private. That means you can’t join us.”

  “Oh.” Lilith pouts. “But I’d like to spend more time with you.”

  “How about sometime in the future?” With my best poker face, I extend my hand. “Why don’t we exchange numbers so we can set something up in a few days?”

  She eagerly pulls out her shiny new iPhone, unlocks it, and places it on my upturned palm.

  As I take the device, scores of mentalism effects swirl through my head—all that involve one devious underlying secret: snooping around someone’s phone. I’d often used that method during my restaurant gig. Only there, I’d pretended to need to use the person’s calculator app, or to see some picture they took that “really represents them” or an image of their pet so “I can guess its name.”

  Just as I would during a performance, I look bored and uninterested as I stealthily navigate to the recent calls with rehearsed proficiency. Once I arrive there, I memorize the few numbers I see. Sadly, not a single one has a name listed next to it. It doesn’t matter, though. Felix should now be in a better position to figure out whom Lilith called in that vision I had earlier. Also, if we’re lucky, he might find out what was actually said.

  Dirty work done, I exit the recent calls with a practiced set of moves and bring up the contacts app. Turning the screen so Lilith can actually see it—and later swear she never took her eyes off it—I demonstratively click the “new contact” button and fill out my info, then place a call to myself.

  Handing her phone back, I wait fo
r mine to ring, then add Lilith as a contact, all the while suppressing another satisfied smile.

  Now I can also give Felix her number to work with.

  “Anything you’d like me to put as your last name?” I ask Lilith before clicking “save contact.” “Is it Rasputina—the feminine variation of my dad’s last name?”

  “No,” she says. “Though Grisha and I did have a ceremony, I wasn’t officially divorced from my previous husband.” Feigning shame, she clutches her nonexistent pearls. “You were illegitimate, I’m afraid. What a scandal.”

  “I doubt I could care less if I try,” I say, then start typing “the evil one” instead of a last name.

  “How about you put down Rossi?” Lilith says. “That was my late husband’s name. Now there was a man who knew what I wanted—often before I did.” She wiggles her eyebrows lasciviously.

  Eww. She really needs that TMI lesson.

  Wait a sec.

  Why does the last name Rossi sound so familiar?

  “Sasha!” Lucretia’s usually calm voice is anything but. “What are you doing talking to her?”

  I turn and see Lucretia standing outside the restaurant, her blue eyes practically jumping out of their sockets.

  Then it hits me.

  Except it can’t be.

  But that is where I heard that name before.

  I turn back to Lilith, then look at my friend and therapist, then once more at the evil one.

  Yep.

  If people at work think Lucretia and I look alike, they haven’t compared her pale facial features to those of Lilith.

  Now that I’m looking for it, the resemblance is uncanny.

  And, of course, Lucretia’s last name is Rossi.

  A name she must’ve gotten from her father—a father who no doubt was an empath, like his daughter.

  Lilith also looks at Lucretia, then back at me, and a wicked smile splits her face. “I thought this was a lunch with your therapist,” she says. “You said nothing about this being a family reunion.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “You’re my sister?” I gape at Lucretia. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Lucretia is staring at me like I’ve just sprouted horns. “You’re her daughter too? Wait, no, you can’t be. You were born on this world and she left it a hundred—” She stops talking, no doubt recalling the story of how my birth certificate is from a century ago.

  Turning to Lilith, she regards her with undisguised contempt. “So you spawned more of us to abandon? How many siblings do I have at this point?”

  “Siblings?” I say, stunned. “Plural?”

  “We better go, dear,” Nostradamus says to Lilith from the car. “Something important just came up.”

  “Saved by the seer,” Lilith says and heaves a dramatic sigh. “You enjoy your gossip,” she tells me as she walks around the front of the car to the driver’s seat. “And keep in mind Lucretia was the one who introduced the whole concept of ‘blame the mother’ into the field of psychology on this world. Her bias against me is as unfair as it is strong.” She waves a beauty pageant goodbye, then slides into the driver’s seat and speeds away.

  Lucretia continues staring at me. “How is this possible?” she asks unsteadily. “How do you even know her? Why is she back?”

  Numbly, I shake my head. “You’re my sister? A half-sister?”

  “Looks like it.” Lucretia studies me as if seeing me for the first time. “Well,” she says after a pause. “I think this calls for at least a hug.”

  Hesitantly, I step toward her and hug her slim frame. Her hair smells like tranquil mossy woods, and my head spins as I attempt to make sense of my tumultuous emotions.

  Underneath the shock, there’s a peculiar lightness, mixed with growing excitement. This, here, is how I always fantasied about reuniting with my birth family.

  It’s so different from when I met Rasputin, the father who abandoned me to save me, and it’s certainly nothing like my encounters with volatile Lilith.

  This joyful reunion is what I always hoped for—and it definitely helps that I liked Lucretia before I knew we were family.

  Liked and respected her.

  In fact, if I put together a list of people to whom I’d want to be related, she’d be very high on it.

  I squeeze her tighter.

  After what feels like a few minutes, we gently pull apart and grin like stoned loons.

  “Let’s feed you,” she says and nods at the restaurant. “You’re starving.”

  How did she—oh right, she can feel my hunger with her empath powers.

  I hope she also sensed the joy I felt at this revelation.

  We walk in and take a seat.

  “Sorry,” I say to her when the waiter hands us two menus. “I just realized I asked you to a restaurant, but you can’t eat anything.”

  She raises her eyebrows. “I can eat.” When the waiter leaves to get us water, she whispers, “I just don’t need to—like with sleep.”

  “So vampires can eat and sleep?” I open the menu. “Vlad made me think otherwise.”

  “Just because you can hypothetically do a thing doesn’t mean you’d want to when you don’t have to.” She looks inside the menu and wrinkles her nose. “The pleasure of eating human food dulls in comparison to the ecstasy of feeding the way we do.” She looks up and glances around, making sure we’re not being overheard. “Sleep too doesn’t provide any rest for us after the transition—just a chance to dream, a dubious reward for wasting eight hours lying in one place like a log.”

  I shake my head, trying to imagine what it would be like not to want to eat or sleep. In this very moment, I’d give a hundred dollars for a nap and double that for a nice meal.

  Hopefully, though, I won’t have to. The prices in this place look reasonable.

  Then something strikes me. “Wait a minute,” I say. “How am I able to speak to you about all the Cognizant stuff? You lost your Mandate aura when you turned, so I should be forbidden from speaking to you, right?”

  She smiles. “The Mandate is actually subtle enough to account for this sort of thing. Its main objective is to keep us from revealing Cognizant secrets to the uninitiated. Since I already know everything, you can speak to me freely.”

  The waiter comes back, and I impress Lucretia by ordering everything in Russian.

  Speaking English, she orders the tushpera soup, claiming for the waiter’s benefit that she isn’t very hungry today.

  “All right, spill it,” she says when he leaves. “How do you know Lilith, and more importantly, why is she back on this world?”

  “Oh yeah. I guess we didn’t get a chance to talk after my last adventure,” I say and launch into the story about gnome-powered spacesuits, a trip through the deadly Otherlands, and my biological father’s rescue. The part I pointedly gloss over is that Nero is a dragon, since it’s not my secret to reveal, and I also keep quiet about what happened between us in that hotel room because, well, oversharing.

  “She came to get revenge on Nero, but learned about me,” I say toward the end. “Then she saved my life twice today, but as to why she’s here, I have no clue.”

  “She saved you?” Lucretia furrows her brows. “That doesn’t seem like her. The woman has no shred of maternal instincts.”

  The waiter brings our soups and the lepyoshka bread, so we temporarily stop speaking.

  “What was it like growing up with her?” I ask when we have privacy again.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Lucretia says bitterly. “My father raised me pretty much on his own. She just showed up from time to time to, and I quote, ‘have the best orgasms of her life.’”

  Damn. Lilith’s TMI thing seems to go way back.

  I blow on a spoonful of my lagmon soup and look at Lucretia. The irony of our usual therapist and patient role reversal isn’t lost on me.

  “Being an empath can sometimes be a curse,” my newfound sister says as she mindlessly stirs her soup. “When my dad was alive, I could feel h
is joy when he spoke with me. But when Lilith deigned to show up, there was a black hole where warm feelings should be. The only thing I’d ever felt from her is an occasional sense of disappointment. I suspect Lilith has always seen me as an annoying side effect of having that mind-blowing sex with my father.” I’m not sure Lucretia realizes it, but she’s bending her spoon with her tight grip. “To Lilith, I’m like an STD that talks, nothing more.” She lets go of the spoon, looking almost Vlad-broody, and I wonder if it would be inappropriate to give her another hug or two.

  Seeing how she doesn’t do it in her capacity as a therapist, I don’t either, but I do cover her hand with mine and squeeze it reassuringly.

  “Sorry about that.” She shakes her head, her usual composure returning as she pulls her hand away and gives me a small smile. “As you can tell, this is a sensitive topic.”

  “Of course,” I say softly. “But are you sure she’s all bad?” Realizing I sound pathetically naïve, I add, “I mean, she didn’t have to save me today, but she did. In a psychotic way, sure, but I’d be dead if it weren’t for Lilith—and Rasputin would’ve likely been killed as well.”

  “I don’t know,” Lucretia says, her blue gaze hardening. “I long ago accepted the truth—that my mother is a monster—and now I can’t get disappointed.”

  I make the mistake of putting a spoonful of soup into my mouth, and the rich flavor of noodles and spicy meat overrules everything else for the next few moments.

  “She may see more of herself in you,” Lucretia says, bringing a spoonful of soup to her own lips, only to cringe in distaste. Putting the spoon down, she says, “Maybe seeing those similarities woke up something maternal in her? I mean, even drekavac mothers love their horrific spawn.”

  “Wait, are you saying I’m like her?” I nearly choke on my soup from indignation. “The person you see as a monster?”

  “I don’t mean it that way.” She stirs the soup again. “The two of you do share a certain deviousness, but you’ve always channeled yours into positive outlets, like your illusions, which makes all the difference in the world.”