AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And the magic inside me sang again, louder this time, and I heard the truth it was singing to me:
If this magic is powerful enough to kill for, it is powerful enough to save you. He wants it. Do not give it to him. He thinks you cannot fight back. So… fight.
Fight.
Everything stopped. The ocean around me went unnaturally still. My lungs, burning for air, calmed. The Gray Man tried to keep walking forward—I felt his confusion when he found he could no longer pull me along, his spell over me broken. Through my eyelids, a brightness began to penetrate the dark. I opened my eyes.
The water around me was suffused with golden light. I looked down to find the source of it—me.As I watched, it spread through my chest, filled my torso, crept down my arms and legs. As it surged through my hands the Gray Man let go with a muffled cry of fury. The magic sang in every particle of me, sustaining me, directing me.
What do I do?I implored the magic.
Call them to your aid. The elements. Call them to you.
And so, as the magic sang in my bones, filling me and sustaining me, I called the elements for the very first time, starting with the one I needed most.
Element of air, I call on you. Come to me, now. Sustain me.
With a roaring force, air came to my aid, blasting down into the water from above, whipping it into a frenzy around me, creating a whirlpool that sucked the water into great spinning walls around me. Suddenly, I was standing, dripping wet, my feet half-buried in sand, a salty breeze whipping my hair and filling my nose and mouth as I sucked in great lungfuls.
The Gray Man stood beside me, frozen in fury, unable to touch me as the magic rose like smoke from my skin, his face split by a black gaping hole that trembled with a silent scream. Or perhaps it wasn’t silent at all—perhaps the magic’s song was simply drowning it out. Able to use my voice now, a called out to the next element that could aid me.
“Element of water, I call on you. You brought the Vesper witches to this place once before. Please, help me home again.”
With a surging force, the ocean answered my call. The walls of the whirlpool collapsed at once around me, but crashing over me, they bore me up on the crest of a great wave. I screamed in terror, but the wave did not batter or pummel me. It carried me, borne on its back, toward the shore again. It gave a heave and I tumbled onto the sand in a wet, shivering heap. For a moment, I simply gasped, trying to regain my breath. I stared around me, but the Gray Man was nowhere to be seen. Hope surged in my breast—could he truly be gone?
The hope receded like the tide as my eyes found the ocean again and watched with wild dread as the Gray Man emerged from the water—his figure less human now than it had been, grotesquely stretched and distorted, limbs curved and wicked, neck elongated, and black eyes burning like pits of fire in his face.
It wasn’t enough. I couldn’t escape him.
Call,the magic sang to me.Call for help and help will come.
I staggered to my feet, facing the Gray Man as he marched inexorably forward, dark power drifting in his wake like smoke. I summoned every last bit of courage in me and called again, my voice brittle but not broken.
“I call on the element of earth. Please, help me.”
At once the ground beneath my feet began to tremble. Behind me, chunks of rock shook loose from the cliff face and crashed to the sand, but I could not turn to look. My eyes were fixed on the Gray Man where he now stood on the shore, free of the ocean’s clutches, and bearing down upon me with a fury that I could taste on the air. As I watched, the earth beneath him began to undulate like the waves behind him. Almost against his will, he dragged his eyes from me, and looked down just in time for a great gaping chasm to open in the sand beneath his feet. Great walls of sand rose up on every side, and poured into the yawning rift, carrying the Gray Man with it, like the tide. He vanished as the chasm filled with sand again, as though it had never been.
My legs suddenly seemed to liquefy, and I sank to the ground, shaking. But even as I put my hands to the sand, I could feel the Gray Man there, his fury and his power vibrating in the sand. I had not stopped him—this was not over.
I felt so drained, so utterly empty, the magic still singing faintly in my fingertips as I raised my eyes to the sky. “I call on the element of fire. Come to my aid. Help me finish this, please.”
I heard the rumble of thunder, and lightning began to glow in the clouds over the sea. A forked bolt of lightning split the sky, striking at the base of the lighthouse. Then a second bolt closer, near the cliff, and charging the air with the tang of electricity.
The chasm in front of me was opening again—the Gray Man was fighting his way free. I felt his monstrous power rising up, splitting and cracking along the fault I had only just closed. I watched in terror as first one elongated hand appeared over its edge, and then another. His nightmare of a face hovered just above the edge. The eyes locked on mine, and the face split into a leer.
“You are mine, Little Bird.” His words filled my head, fed on my fear.
The chasm widened and spread, cracking along the sand toward me—the earth would surely swallow me, too. A deafening clap of thunder boomed, just as one more bolt of lightning shattered the roiling gray of the stormy sky.
This time, the lightning found its mark. It struck the Gray Man where he stood, igniting him like an explosive. The smell of sulfur and charged air blasted outward, even as the sand rose up around him in strange, jagged formations. He writhed and screamed, contorted and burned where he stood.
This was the moment. I had to finish it. And I couldn’t do it alone, whatever the power I possessed. I needed the First Daughters.
“Spirit,” I whispered. “I call on you. On the Vesper witches that came before me, I call on you. Help me. Help me to bind him in this place.”
I tugged Asteria’s charm from my neck and it came loose. With shaking fingers, I tugged out the folded drawing of the Gray Man, and the ribbon that Asteria had wound around it thirteen years ago. The words found their way to my tongue, as though I’d always known them, and I repeated them over and over again, as I wound the ribbon around the paper.
“I bind you from doing harm,” I whispered. “I bind you to this place.”
