Silver Nitrate(113)

No, not quite. For a moment he looked to be flesh and blood, nostrils flaring, and then he flickered. The edges of him were smudged one second, crisp the next. He was still a half-thing, existing between spaces. Oh, but he was more real than she’d ever seen him before.

She could almost taste the power of the sorcerer, trace the edges of the magic holding him in place. She was afraid she’d inhaled some of this power, of Ewers, that it would settle in her lungs like the smoke of tobacco.

“I’m already there,” he said and pressed a finger against the hollow of her throat. “Make me live.”

She was tired and he was right. It was as José López had explained. All she and Tristán had done was essentially cause an explosion and they’d been exposed to a radioactive element, to poison, because of it. This magic she commanded wasn’t hers. It was his. Bits of Ewers, his runes and his spells, channeled and making their way around them. It was heady, this well of strength, it made her head spin.

“Will me to life. Say it. Say I live.”

“Words are ritual, gestures are spells,” she muttered, dazed.

“Yes.”

Her pulse drummed madly. They’d done exactly what he wanted anyway. Drawn his runes, played his game. She had not given in to fear but still she’d bent to his will. One way or another, as he’d promised. Dancing to his tune, following the steps he traced…

“Momo!”

“Complete my ritual.”

A thought cleaved her mind. His runes, his ritual. He’d stolen bits of knowledge, remade it, remixed it, took from here and there. He’d painted a canvas, but he had not invented colors. Even now, even this spell they were completing was not how the original ritual would have gone. It was not the way he’d planned it.

No, this magic, this moment, it belonged as much to them as it did to him. They’d shaped it. He wished to crush the world in his fist and name it his, yet this could not be.

The room was very dark. Even the projectors seemed to be malfunctioning, the light streaming from them no longer blazing white but gone dim. Yet even though he was half-shrouded in shadow, she looked beyond Ewers’s shoulder at Tristán.

“Draw our runes!” she told Tristán.

“Complete me, for without me there is nothing,” Ewers said. He looked almost amused as he gazed down at her, and she stared back at him knowing what he meant. Force, authority, magic, all of it, there for the taking, if she should want it. No more eating crumbs from the ground, no more groveling and wishing for greatness.

She was tempted to parrot the words he asked of her, to turn the key and unleash him. She gaped at him, afraid for the first time not of him but of herself and the selfish, covetous corner of her heart that wished to simply submit and reap the prizes he’d promised.

Poetry, symmetry in a world that was chaos and grime.

“I drew the runes!” Tristán yelled. “Be gone!”

“How he squawks. He’s a weakling,” Ewers said. “You don’t want to be weak, do you?”

She looked at him, thinking back, to the train tracks and the grain and the streets of her childhood and the day she’d met Tristán, leaning on her cane and peering at a little boy with dark, large eyes.

“I’ve never been weak,” she whispered. “And neither has Tristán.”

Ewers began to turn his head, lazily, in Tristán’s direction, but she extended a hand and held his chin in place, forcing him to look into her eyes. “But you are weak. Yes. You are dead, Wilhelm Ewers. Dead and buried and nothing but ash,” she said, abruptly, fiercely; each word was thought made will and emotion.

She remembered exactly who she was talking to. A thief who snatched secrets from other warlocks across the continent, a liar who told others what they wanted to hear, a swindler who conned his lovers, and a murderer. A voracious predator. But as she gritted her teeth, she was not afraid of him, and as she looked at him, she didn’t covet any of his secrets. She wished him gone.

“It’s the end of the show,” she said. “Your movie is over. And so are you. We will it and therefore it is.”

The projectors burst into flames, popping and sizzling. This fire would not be quenched the second time around. Ewers’s eyes, which were luminous silver, reflected only scorn. But then his skin began flaking off, turning gray, and Ewers looked at her in bewilderment.

He opened his mouth to yell, perhaps to attempt an incantation, some countermove, but his face was dissolving, as if someone had pressed the tip of a cigarette against a bit of film, blackening it. His jaw fell and broke, then sizzled on the ground, a cinder that was being quickly consumed. She pushed him away, and the entirety of his body was twisted, stretched, it seemed to shift colors, turning violet and yellow and blue; red-hot blisters ravaged his chest, his hands. He bent and his skin bubbled, his body shrank and it was no longer a body, but a smudge on the floor.

Clarimonde screamed, pinned beneath the chandelier, stretching out a hand in Ewers’s direction while the acrid scent of nitrate filled the room and fire began blooming on the walls and creeping up the ceiling. The cultists who had not yet fled yelled and ran, bumping against one another and rushing to the exits, attempting to escape the cauldron that the room had become.

She ran to Tristán, who was kneeling, head bowed, one arm wrapped around his belly. On the floor she saw the two symbols Tristán had traced next to Ewers’s runes, negating his spell, reversing it, making it theirs: their childhood signatures, the two small figures that represented Montserrat and Tristán in the secret messages they’d passed around.