Bitter Magic (World War Magic Book 2) Read online

  Another crazed bolt of light whooshed into the sky. It was too bright to look at. A crumpling explosion burst the air overhead, pounding Grainne’s eardrums. The world of noise shrieked into a high whine. Feedback. Static. The air above her danced with sparks.

  After a second, Grainne realized she was lying on her back. Her leg had twisted as she fell, caught in her chair. Her lungs were empty, winded as she landed on her back with force enough to drive the air from her body.

  The skin of her ankle burned, nerves screaming with sudden heat. Grainne twisted and clawed at the stone tiles of the square to crawl away. She didn’t know from what. Pain, fear, panic, propelled her forward.

  A wide-eyed glance back over her shoulder showed a charred cinder hole where their table had been. Stone tiles had burst upward, landing in a scattered semi-circle around them. One had struck the forehead of a waiter. He lay flat on his back. Eyes closed. Glasses smashed. Bleeding.

  Grainne’s hearing returned, thuds crashed down all around her. She kicked her leg free of the chair she’d been dragging and curled her legs to her chest. A child making herself as small as possible. To her left, a bag of meat exploded on the ground. The air was stuffed full of screaming and smoke. Purple smoke. It dancing across the square, encircling her ankle, flowing up her leg.

  More thuds. The screaming grew louder. The world pulsated in a spinning purple disco ball. The urge to run for safety overpowered the desire to make herself small. Grainne tottered to her feet, her hurt ankle giving way once before the pain evaporated and she could run.

  Another bag of meat smashed into the ground in front of her. Grainne gasped and threw her weight backward. Awkwardly trying to turn. Out of the cloud of crimson-pink splatter nearest her, she could see a face. Spread out, almost a foot wide. With horror, Grainne realized it was a person. Another thud. She turned and saw another body had landed close by.

  People. All around her people were falling from the sky.

  She jerked her head back, staring upward. A spinning piece of metal was headed straight for her. Grainne dove to the side, a confusion of light and sound shattering her mind. There was a split second of intense pain as her scrawny body hit the ground, her hip smashed into pieces. A startling zipping feeling along her side, then the pain was gone, and she could crawl farther away.

  Emily began to scream.

  Chapter Three

  Grainne sat up in bed, her mouth lolling open. Inside her chest, her heart beat in a rapid staccato rhythm with odd bursts of syncopation. Her legs were tangled in the sheets, sweat melding them to her drenched nightgown, dragging against her skin like it was rubber. She shook her head to clear it and felt the tears already running down her cheeks.

  In exhaustion, she fell back against the pillows. Sleep had become her enemy. Instead of offering her a brief respite, a chance to recharge, it drained her until she could barely more. Rather than offering her a glimpse of the peaceful world in which she’d spent most of her life, it gave her pain and terror. It served up Emily’s terrifying death. She’d avoid it but the long drag of seconds, minutes and hours that made up her dull, dying days were an even more horrific choice.

  When her heartbeat steadied, and inhalations managed to deliver oxygen to her starving lungs, Grainne swung her legs over the side of the bed. She sat up, not ready to start the day but offered little choice.

  Her head was stuffed full of cotton wool, not helped by the muffled environment of her enclosed box. The seal that trapped her inside also trapped the sounds of the living world beyond her ability to hear. In her prison, she couldn’t hear birds, traffic, or even the whistle of wind moving past the walls. A cage where all sound died.

  Even the noise Grainne produced as she moved about were damped down, their edges softened, so they merged one into another. If she’d been asked to guess at senses she would miss being stimulated, hearing wouldn’t have made it near the top of the list. During her days in the normal world, sounds had been a thing to startle or shock her. Spats of sudden information that broke her concentration or would drill into her head.

  Along with every sound she’d ever resented, though, she’d also lost the sweet music of a natural orchestra. Birdsong swinging into an aria in the highest register, and offset to the low backbeat of machinery. The hum and swish of cars passing by, the buzz of electricity along a high-strung wire.

  Forget the music pumped out by individual self-expression or commercial endeavors to rid the world of its change through a monthly fee. Just the sweet sounds of life being lived would be a tune she’d swap her soul to listen to one more time.

  The computer dangled a lifeline in front of her. Everything she wanted, so long as it came in a tiny kilobyte package. The local LAN that had miraculously connected her to her neighbors went no further than the end of the lane. As far as she could tell, it was a closed system. A type of neighborhood watch that seemed creepily invasive. Though, presumably, in the real world, one would only set up the CCTV to broadcast on your way outside.

  The router was in place, the cords plugged in. That was the extent of Grainne’s knowledge. Frustration at her age and focus if she dwelt on the thought there might be something more she could do. Some switch, some knob, some piece of code she could type in to put the whole world back at her fingertips.

  On the bright side, if the government agents monitoring her actions saw megabytes streaming in from the outside world, they’d surely cut the connection. Either way, she was screwed.

  There was no proof that anybody was monitoring her. The thought was straight supposition, but she had to believe it. Otherwise, why were they here?

  The internal CCTV had been in place before Grainne’s arrival, but there were signs dotted around the rooms, piles of sawdust, the glinting rose gold of freshly cut wires, that spoke to an upgrade. People only maintained cameras if they wanted to see what was happening. Given the entertainment factors of first Mary, then Jane, surely someone out had their gaze glued to the screen.

  Some cameras were fixed while others panned from left to right and back again. The feed switched from one to another, with a montage of each in miniature always along the right-hand side. The quality was poor. Static buzzed and hummed across the screen, keeping the picture in constant motion even when things inside the house were still. Most of the time, in other words.

  Grainne had balked at the camera inside her bedroom. Shaking her head, she’d thrown a facecloth across to hide the room. She’d done that long before she’d found the laptop, set it up, and discovered the images being broadcast. Even now, she had to fight against the urge to cover them all.

  If she did that, somebody might be sent in to check. Presumably, they’d enter with a gun and sort out the ramifications later. Worse still, nobody might enter to examine the situation at all. A creeping dread of fire and flame had ignited into a full-blown phobia following Emily’s death. It was all too easy for Grainne to imagine a sneaking soldier pouring gasoline and lighting a match to dispose of the problem.

  The fear rose up, like a hand pushing up through her esophagus to choke her from the inside. For a second, Grainne gagged, then she determinedly swallowed the sensation down.

  One private room. That was the limit she allowed herself. The camera out in the hall, swayed back and forth, taking in the lead up to the stairs, the edge of the bedroom, and then all the way across for a shot straight into the bathroom.

  There was no door. The one that should have been there had been popped off its hinges before Grainne arrived. The gouges dug into the metal moldings showed the work had been carried out recently. If she’d been in any doubt.

  In the shower, the patterned curtain could still be drawn across to form a barrier to watching eyes. Even so, for the first few days, Grainne had been terrified of the spying. Her modesty rose like a gagging rage inside her throat, overpowering her basic bodily urges.

  A situation that couldn’t last forever.

  After the first time, it grew steadily easier. Wasn’t that
the way of all unpleasant things? Whatever piece of her soul was chipped away by being on display twenty-four seven, wasn’t required in payment every day. And better a sneaky side-view of a leg than a camera staring straight at your face each time you sat down. Unless some terrible incident occurred upstairs, the downstairs bathroom was safe from Grainne.

  When she’d first dug the laptop out of the closet, hardly daring to believe they’d leave something so precious for her to find, Grainne had hidden her use of it. In corners, hunching her shoulders so the empty eyes of the camera couldn’t see. Under a blanket, until her trapped breath steamed up the small screen.

  One day, she’d accessed the feed that streamed in constant packets from each camera. To her horror, she’d discovered that the blank windows formed a dark mirror, reflecting her actions to the staring eye.

  After that, it seemed pointless to try again. If someone were going to come in and stop Grainne using the laptop, the time would have come and gone. There was nothing much to see, in any case. The same images that anybody watching would have been viewing themselves. Grainne playing a few hundred games of Freecell before turning her attention to Hearts.

  The laptop came out into the open, and there it stayed. The focus of Grainne’s day. If it hadn’t been there to provide a distraction, the nibbles of panic would surely have escalated into gnawing. The gnawing into tearing, rending her innocent flesh with saber-sharp teeth. Given time, panic and fear would soon have swallowed her whole.

  With some pointless card games, though, the panic could be contained like a small rodent. It came out every day to nibble away but just enough to file down its growing teeth. Not enough to cause harm, to inflict core damage. It was only allowed to take a few bites, the same way Grainne portioned out her own meager supplies of food.

  Thinking of food, she was sure that was the main reason why Jane shot herself yesterday. What a bumbling numbskull she could be. If Grainne had a shotgun, she would at least have used it to try to get the hell out of there. She could have aimed it at the door, shot through, and tried to take at least one of the asshole’s responsible for this slow torture with her.

  Jane had always been inwardly focused. The whining she indulged in about her figure, about her diet, fed into the overwhelming anxiety she harbored that she’d never fit in or be accepted. Stuck deep inside her own troubles, Jane never thought to judge those around her the same way she expected them to cast judgment upon her.

  Grainne had been raised better than that. She’d been brought up judging. She also found most people wanting. She was raised to know that she was better than those around her. She knew she was special. God had picked her for a sunbeam.

  What truly horrified Grainne, now that the shock was passing, was that Jane thought so little of Grainne she let her watch. Not just let her, practically compelled her. Sitting in front of the only screen in existence, knowing that would be where Grainne’s eyes were fixed. Always watching, always waiting.

  Maybe that was the reason that society condemned suicides as selfish. The two of them had only been connected through their laptops for a couple of weeks. No sound, just positioning themselves so the feed would pass their image to the other.

  Jane was such a selfish bitch that she’d now left Grainne all alone.

  Of course, that was a better ending than Mary. If Grainne could have scrubbed her eyes raw with a Brillo pad to rid them of those visions, she would. When she’d first brought Mary’s CCTV images up on her tiny screen, she’d been delighted and deeply, irrationally jealous to see that Mary had a furry friend.

  Careless. Jane had a gun left in her house. Both had found laptops. Lastly, some poor moggy wandered into a house, probably while soldiers left the front door wide open, and voila! Mary has a new best friend.

  Grainne had spent days oscillating between fierce jealousy and fiercer envy. Her enraged and lonely mind spanned the whole spectrum from, I want what you have, through to, I don’t want you to have it.

  For a while, at least Grainne could lord it over Mary. She’d found a way to connect with Jane using the computer, and the camera feeds. Mary just had a scrawny cat. It was Grainne’s turn to feel clever like she’d got one over on her friend. Until she realized Mary’s favorite game of one-upmanship only worked when the other person was aware they were one-upped.

  Grainne shook herself and stood, wandering through into the kitchen. If she let her mind stay glued in the past, there was only one way it would head. Isolation was a brutish thing; she didn’t need to pile on the misery when that was already her state of mind.

  The kitchen supplies didn’t raise any smiles, though. Meager to begin with, they were constantly dwindling. What seemed a fair portion when you “had a fair bit,” seemed far too much when you ate your way down to “not a lot.”

  Having scant food certainly made the plastic cutlery situation more bearable. On arrival—or awakening, to be more accurate—the hastily shopped for groceries included a small supply of fresh meat and vegetables. The effort required to prepare those for cooking with sporks had been a dance with frustration.

  Even then, Grainne had tried to ration her supply. A task much easier back then, with fear ballooning inside her stomach. Who needed to eat when you could sit in quiet desperation instead?

  It was the smell of the meat that alerted her she’d done the wrong thing. Not an uncommon situation. It was the second or third day—with no watch, no laptop at that stage, and a head that pounded so loudly it seemed a harbinger of doom, Grainne hadn’t been able to keep track. At the first whiff of something off, she’d cooked up all the meat. The bites she’d managed to swallow down had a sour tang to them. It upset her stomach for hours afterward, and when she picked up the next plateful to eat, it refused to let her even try.

  In the end, scared that if she left the meat on the bench to rot it would draw unwelcome house guests, Grainne had pulled it apart with her fingers and fed it into the toilet bowl, flushing as often as she dared.

  The fresh vegetables had fared better, but they’d still gone quicker than she hoped they would. When the choice was between a plastic packet full of low-nutrition carbohydrates flavored with an overdose of sodium to make it palatable or a carrot, the carrot won every time.

  Now the choice was no longer an option. Despite the increasing levels of hunger, Grainne forced herself into stricter and stricter rationing. There wouldn’t be another shopping trip in her future. Mary had taught her that, loud and clear.

  The old pride she used to feel when she lasted through a liquid diet, a cleansing detox, or even when she made it through the holy days unscathed had gone now. The pleasure of achievement was now lost to commonality.

  Grainne thought, if she were released now, she could eat for a year and still not feel satiated. She could imagine walking into a restaurant, ordering everything on the menu, and still leave wanting more.

  When the food was finally all gone, she imagined that her stomach would try to devour itself. Her body would eat away at her muscles, her flesh, trying to use the energy from every last unnecessary scrap of her to keep her brain alive until the last.

  Hunger strikers had blazed a trail before her. Surely, if somebody could do this by choice, necessity should be easier.

  Perhaps that would be a comforting thought when Grainne ate the last pathetic mouthful on offer. Maybe it would ease her mind right up until the moment she was dead.

  Chapter Four

  Grainne’s great-great-grandfather had been a war hero. The man had donated decades from the prime of his life toward the process. Nolan Helmond. The name didn’t mean anything to anybody anymore, but back in the day, he’d garnered a great deal of respect.

  Apparently.

  The crowning achievement of his life had been the eradication of magic. A feat he’d performed with diligence, bravery, persistence, and plain old common sense.

  He’d died before Grainne’s birth, so their physical paths never crossed. As a family, they were far too picky to produ
ce new generations that quickly. It took everybody in her family a long while to choose a mate. Even longer to make the decision on whether to breed at all.

  She was a shining example of that familial trait. Forty-three years old and she’d lived alone her entire life. Well, she’d been cloistered with a group of other nuns for half that, but she’d never lived with a partner. Never shared more than one night with a man.

  Despite the long years stretching between them, Grainne still experienced a strong pull of affection toward her long-dead relative. Although his name was lost to the annals of time, he still loomed large within their family. Instead of fairy tales growing up, she’d had Nolan tales. Although looking back, it was hard to sort out how much fabrication might be stirred in with the truth. Considering how tight-lipped her family was—another trait she exhibited strong affiliation with—surely, he’d never exposed so much of himself as the stories told.

  When the cloud of purple smoke had encircled her body and healed her ankle free of pain, Grainne had known instantly what it was. She recognized it and rejected it wholeheartedly. Magic had always been a pestilence upon the earth. It disgusted her to feel it moving about on her, inside her.

  Like the random plague that strikes and pursues a man into death, magic wasn’t something she could get rid of. Nothing like a headache that she could take two aspirin for, and hope to recover from by the morning. The stuff dug in, became a part of her. Every beat of her heart sent it pumping, cavorting through her body. A slimy secret, tainting her blood.

  The first reaction, shame, was still deeply embedded in her psyche. The reaction remained, even as the focus of its laser glare had changed. Now, instead of feeling ashamed that magic had dirtied her soul and dragged her down into filth and depravity, Grainne felt embarrassed that her confusion and self-disgust led her to turn in their little troupe.