Jail Break
Jail Break
Part Eleven of "North of Midnight," a Spell Weaver novella
Need to read an earlier episode first? Click the button below for an episode list (with the earliest at the bottom).
Where we left off: Alexandra and her friends tried to break the barrier imprisoning their souls but failed. Arson-Dulai’s doppelganger appeared, allegedly to eat their souls. Alexandra managed to get Antonio to use his love magic—but at the cost of losing himself.
Arson-Dulai’s doppelganger looked much smaller in the love-light Antonio had generated. But the creature wasn’t done yet. He raised the skull over his head, and blackness poured from its eye sockets—or tried to. If the blackness got more than a few inches from the skull, it began to lighten, like ink spreading into a much larger quantity of water.
The Ladies of the Lake had recovered sufficiently to attack the doppelganger with their water magic. He kept it at bay, swirling around him like a cloud of mist, but he didn’t seem to be able to dispel it completely.
I should have kept focused on him, but I couldn’t help myself—I had to see what had happened to Antonio.
His eyes shined in the light that he kept generating—but they still weren’t his eyes. They remained vampire-red and expressionless. Yet the love magic radiating from him remained pure, at least as far as I could tell. I clung to that idea. Surely, no vampire could wield such positive energy. That was what I told myself, anyway.
I forced my attention away from Antonio. His power remained surprisingly high, and there was little I could do for him. But maybe watching Arson-Dulai more closely with my magically enhanced senses would turn up a clue as to how to beat him.
I focused myself on him as if he were the only other being in the universe. At that level of concentration, I noticed something I hadn’t picked up earlier—the skull glowed more brightly than he did.
Jimmie had mentioned artifacts. What if Arson-Dulai had sent along an artifact to prop up his incomplete doppelganger?
“Go for the skull!” I told the others. “I think it might be a power source.”
I didn’t try to figure how he had the skull in this place. It had seemed a physical object back in the physical world. But fortunately, someone else had been pondering that.
“If he can make the skull manifest here, we should be able to manifest our weapons in the same way,” said Jimmie. “Give it a try!”
In a ghostly place where Lucas could dance across a nonexistent floor, why couldn’t people imagine their weapons and use them?
The doppelganger shook the skull as if trying to get more power out of it, but the Ladies of the Lake kept him deadlocked. Jimmie held something in his hand, but it looked more like a glass sword than a metal one. Khalid had glimmers of light in the approximate shape of a bow. Umbra had something like an icicle rather than a dagger. But all of that was progress.
I tried to visualize a wooden stake in my hand and got a pile of sawdust at first. But as I watched, it tried to shape itself into a reasonable facsimile of a stake.
A flicker in the light caught my eye. Antonio was starting to weaken. His facial muscles were tight, and he had begun shaking again. Given his earlier performance, it was a miracle he’d lasted this long.
“Power share with Antonio,” I yelled into everybody else’s heads. But at that moment, there wasn’t too much power to spare. Viviane and Vanora needed to maintain their own magic as long as they could. Everyone else except Lucas had to keep focused on manifesting their weapons if they were to have any chance of success.
Without skipping a beat, Lucas spun into a dance that almost instantly sent fire and lightning sparking off of him as his movement invoked the power of Chango. Antonio’s light, which had been flickering like a candle flame, stabilized once more, though he still looked strained. Also worrisome was that the mist of power that had surrounded Lucas when he danced before and gradually hid him from view didn’t accumulate this time. Antonio and the Ladies of the Lake were clearly drawing magic as fast as he could produce it.
Much as I wanted to charge the doppelganger and rip the skull out of his hands, I might be more useful as support for Antonio—assuming I could reach him anymore. His face was like a mask. His tense expression remained unmoving. His eyes, fixed on the doppelganger, didn’t convey anything of the Antonio I met just hours before.
And I hadn’t been mistaken—there were fangs poking out from between his almost closed lips.
Ignoring how disconcerting he looked, I ran in his direction. Whatever magic the doppelganger had used to make him seem impossibly far away had faded, leaving no obstacle between Antonio and me.
He seemed to not notice me as I took him in my arms. He was rigid as a board. But when I touched him, the power radiating from him got brighter. That was all the encouragement I needed.
Kissing him felt almost like kissing a brick wall, but I persisted. He had to be in there somewhere. If he hadn’t been, his magic would have stopped flowing.
I heard the twang of Khalid’s bow and turned just enough to see his arrow strike the doppelganger—no, the skull. By the time of its fourth blast—divine blessing—the skull’s magic vanished, at least for the moment.
The doppelganger stumbled backward, perhaps intending to flee. But Umbra had maneuvered herself behind him and blocked his path, dagger raised, eyes searching for the most vulnerable spot. Jimmie moved in from the front, his sword fully formed and glowing brightly.
I felt Antonio convulse in my arms as his magic intensified. The doppelganger screamed. Jimmie, making what must have been a one-in-a-million shot, slashed with his sword in such a way that he sliced off both the doppelganger’s hands in one smooth motion. The doppelganger howled and vanished. Another one of Khalid’s arrows raced through the open space less than a second later.
“We won—but we’re still trapped,” said Khalid, looking at the barrier.
“Don’t speak too soon,” said Vanora. “The doppelganger’s injuries, even though they weren’t physical, seem to have jolted the magic holding us prisoner. Look!’
She was right. The gray flakes I had noticed earlier were dissolving, leaving small holes as they did so. The surrounding darkness didn’t try to pull together to fill the gap. Instead, each gap widened over time.
I heard a tearing sound when the barrier, now riddled with holes, started to collapse around us like a falling tent. I was submerged in darkness again for a moment. Then whatever was left of the barrier dissolved, leaving us in a place that remained dark and dreary—but no longer confining.
“We are somewhere near our bodies,” said Vanora. “Your soul’s natural tendency will be to return to your body. Let its instincts be your guide.”
Sure enough, I found myself drifting, and I let myself follow that path. Too late, I realized that I had lost track of Antonio.
I looked back, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. Perhaps he had returned to his body faster than I had to mine. I tried to tell myself that was the case. But something felt wrong.
I wanted to reverse course and look for him, but my body had too strong a grip on me. It might not be wise to try to break it, but I didn’t care. I struggled, but I kept moving in the same direction. Within seconds, I opened my eyes—my real eyes, not some illusion created by my soul so that I could understand what was happening around me.
We were alone in the underground chamber where Janice had first snatched our souls. Janice herself, fake Dracula, the doppelgangers—including that of Arson-Dulai—were all gone. Nor were there any stray vampires or Formorians left. Even Elatha had left.
“It can’t be over that easily,” said Khalid. “We never—and I mean never—have luck like that.”
“It does seem strange that we are all alone here,” said Lucas.
Vanora managed to sit up, though she looked like proverbial death warmed over, and she spoke slowly and faintly, as if she barely had the strength to talk. “It’s nearly dawn now. That means…that means the vampires will soon be inactive.”
“But not the Formorians,” said Jimmie. He had just spotted his own doppelganger, lying dead on the ground. It had deep wounds, and the floor nearby was still slick with blood. He shuddered, but then he went right on talking. God help him, he was used to this sort of thing.
“Why would Elatha and his crew leave without even putting up a fight?”
Viviane was up now, too, her skin pale and her eyes dull. But like Vanora, she seemed determined to force words out, even though she sounded hoarse, and I could barely hear her. “At a guess, their strategy depended on the Arson-Dulai doppelganger—and the skull it carried, apparently. We must have managed to injure the doppelganger enough to frighten him into fleeing. With him gone, I imagine they wouldn’t have enough magic among them to sustain something like the barrier around the town that prevents supernatural communication and travel. It takes a huge amount of power to maintain something like that over so large an area, and they wouldn’t have had time to make it self-sustaining.”
“But why would the Arson-Dulai doppelganger run?” asked Khalid. “I thought the soul was indestructible, so what would he have to fear?”
“It is indestructible,” said Vanora. “But doppelgangers have no souls. Even someone like Arson-Dulai would have had no magic that could duplicate a soul, and removing our souls from our bodies didn’t interfere with the doppelganger creation process. It most certainly would have if the soul was being duplicated as part of that process.
“As a doppelganger develops, it duplicates the mind of its host, but not the soul. So what we encountered must have been some aspect of Arson-Dulai’s imperfectly replicated mind—and a mind can be destroyed. We injured it, it returned to its body, and fled—much to the annoyance of its allies, I’m guessing.”
I tried to visualize the town and could see that a barrier was still in place around it, but it did give me the impression of frailty. I suspected it wouldn’t hold much longer.
“So what now?” asked Khalid. “Do we pursue them?”
“In our present condition, those of us whose doppelgangers had already started forming are pretty well drained,” said Umbra, voice sounded raspy. “We need a lot of rest. Magic could help, but the people most adept at that are—”
“Viviane and Vanora,” finished Jimmie. “They can’t have much magic left.
“Anyway, our enemies’ magic wouldn’t have prevented them from opening a portal and fleeing through it,” said Umbra. “They could be anywhere in this world—or even on another plane of existence.”
“The vampires seemed native to this world,” I said, though I had no idea about whether or not vampires might exist on other planes.
“The Fomorians are native to the plane on which the Irish faeries, the Tuatha Dé Danann, live,” said Viviane. “We’ll have to get in touch with their leaders.”
“The Dagda owes us a solid,” said Khalid.
“At least one,” said Viviane, nodding her agreement. “Anyway, the Formorians are supposed to remain deep below ground or equally deep in the depths of the sea. The Tuatha will be most interested to learn that at least some of them have been out taking unsanctioned field trips—and meddling in the affairs of mortals. I imagine the Tuatha will take care of them for us.”
“And Faux Dracula?” asked Lucas.
“He could be anywhere by now. My guess is he and Janice—who doesn’t seem to be here, either—went with the Arson-Dulai doppelganger. Faux Dracula used the same kind of magic, and Janice was almost certainly possessed by the doppelganger—which means she didn’t go willingly.”
“We have to find them—and her,” said Khalid.
“And we will try,” said Vanora, sounding more ready for sleep than for a manhunt or a rescue mission. “But we need to prepare ourselves, probably wait for the others to return. The doppelganger made a serious mistake by confronting us in the soul prison after using so much magic. All he had to do was leave us there long enough for our doppelgangers to be complete. But he didn’t, and he paid the price for that. I doubt he’ll be as stupid a second time. We need to wait for the others to return before we try to engage him again.”
“Alexandra, are we reasonably sure they’ve all really left town?” asked Lucas.
I visualized the town again, looking for blank spots that could indicate concealment magic. I also looked for the magic signatures that I’d grown accustomed to. I found none.
“As far as I can tell, all the intruders are gone,” I said.
“I doubt they’ll return right away,” said Vanora. “But we must be cautious. Lucas, if you’re up to it, I need you to dance up enough magic so that Viviane and I can seal the loophole in the security system than enabled them to get away so easily.”
“I’ll do what I can,” replied Lucas, already in motion.
“What about your…fatigue?” asked Jimmie.
“As we draw on the magic Lucas dances up, we can use part of it to recharge ourselves physically,” replied Vanora, already sounding stronger. “It’s not an ideal situation, but we can rest right after.”
It was only then that I noticed what I should have realized the moment I opened my eyes.
Antonio was nowhere to be seen.
“North of Midnight” is related to the Spell Weaver series. (Chronologically, the action falls between Books Six and Seven.)
You can also find series information and book previews here:
🙃🙃🙃🤗🤗🤗😘😘😘😍😍😍🥰🥰🥰