The Potioneer (Shadeborn Book 3) Read online

  “I told you,” he replied, and finally, there was a spark of something more than sorrow in his gaze. “I told you the moment you broke that damned mirror. He didn’t want to believe me, of course.”

  Lily knew exactly who Salem was referring to, and she merely gave a nod.

  “Well, it looks like Novel believes you now,” she offered.

  Salem made a little scoffing noise, and an empty grin graced the gap in his beard.

  “What’s he decided to do about it?” he asked.

  “He’s calling a potioneer, whatever that is,” Lily answered.

  “From London?” Salem added sharply.

  He studied Lily’s face for a careful moment and, when she nodded in reply, Salem broke into the first genuine laugh she’d heard in a long time. He pointed a finger into the air, eyes gleaming, and shook it with authority as he spoke.

  “See, this is what happens when you don’t consult important people about your plans,” he explained. “I have a particularly nasty history with the potioneer circle in London, and they’re not going to want to help anyone even remotely associated with me, let alone my blood kin.”

  “A circle,” Lily repeated with interest. “So, it’s like a business?”

  Salem shook his head.

  “Don’t be fooled, honey. Every potioneer is out for themselves. The accumulation of their power is far more important to them than the things they do to help others. Novel will have to pay big time to lift a djinn curse from your pretty little head.”

  “Djinn curse?” Lily repeated, and it was her turn to study Salem’s serious face. “What’s a djinn?”

  “Creatures that dwell within enchanted glass,” Salem answered, quirking a dark brow. “Doesn’t he teach you anything important?”

  In five minutes with Salem Cross, Lily learned more than Novel had told her in as many weeks. She learned that potioneers were humans who practised many different kinds of magic for a very high price, and she learned that the mirror she had broken in Novel’s dressing room had most likely awoken one of the creatures Salem had referred to as the djinnkind.

  “Of course, there’s no way to know which djinn you’re dealing with,” Salem surmised, “but if your luck’s been as bad as you say, then it’s probably a powerful one.”

  “And what does Novel think a potioneer can do about that?” Lily pressed, all her curiosity from the last two months rolling out with abandon.

  “Probably hide you from their gaze,” Salem replied with a shrug, “or maybe create some good fortune to counteract the bad. He ought to have tried the Irish magic folk, really, lots of shamrocks going on there. Of course, if he’d asked me…”

  Salem wagged that finger again, and Lily could already see his mood deflating. It was hard to watch him descending back into the sense of his own uselessness, and she reached out a hand to his shoulder. Salem looked at her, his eyes already faded back to their usual dull sadness, but there was a faint light in their depths, like he was thinking intensely despite his forlorn feelings.

  “Right now, you’re the most helpful person in this whole theatre, Salem,” Lily said.

  “Well you’re sure as hell cursed if that’s true,” he answered grimly.

  “I’m sorry that you feel the way you do,” she began, “and that I interrupted you up here.”

  The older shade shrugged his broad shoulders and raised his hands, running them back through the strands of his overgrown hair.

  “He had Gerstein keeping watch on me when I was locked in my bedroom,” Salem explained. “That’s why I came up here. No faces in the walls.”

  Lily looked around the room, which performers so often used for their rehearsals, and she found that Salem was right. There were no pictures on the walls here, no portraits, posters or tapestries for a simulacra to inhabit. Short of the off-chance that a face-like fold might appear in the curtains, or the creases of the old leather on which she sat, Lily was fairly certain that Gerstein couldn’t reach the attic room with his powers of observation.

  “Why did you come up here?” Salem asked.

  “Novel asked me to meet him here,” Lily answered, “I guess he’s not out of bed yet.”

  It was just after sundown outside the attic’s small windows, and as Lily checked her watch, Salem dragged his sullen form onto its feet.

  “That’s definitely my cue to leave,” he surmised.

  Lily watched the sad figure padding barefoot towards the door, and she saw the heave in his shoulders as he pulled it open. Salem looked back as he stood in the slice of white light from the corridor, and tried his best to give Lily a smile.

  “You know, maybe you and I ought to talk more,” he suggested, “you might be good for my recovery.”

  Something proud stirred in Lily’s heart. She was pretty sure that this was the first time Salem had even talked about the future, or getting better at all, and she nodded fervently at his idea. He smiled again, warmer this time, and then he left the attic. Lily let out a deep breath, and it echoed all around the empty space as her eyes drank in the faceless room, looking up to its dark, raftered ceiling.

  “Salem!”

  She shouted suddenly, as a thought hit her mind. There was a rumbling of footsteps, then the creak of a door, and Salem’s shaggy face was back in the room.

  “What do they look like?” Lily demanded. “These djinn things?”

  Salem was clearly thrown by the question, and he wet his lips in thought as he answered.

  “They’ve got skin like glass,” Salem answered, his brow shifting into the twisted focus of a distant memory. “It looks kind of blue from a distance. And their eyes – well, if you can call them eyes – they’re red like coral.”

  It felt as though a fist of ice had wrapped its fingers around Lily’s heart. The vision in the lecture hall came back to her, clear as day, of the creature looking in on the high glass roof. Blue skin and red eyes, Lily was certain that that was exactly what she’d seen.

  “Anything else?” Salem asked, and Lily jumped out of her thoughts as quickly as the memory had sucked her in.

  “Not right now,” she answered, “but it’s like you said, Salem. You and I ought to talk more.”

  The older shade grinned, and his eyes were shining again.

  “Count on it.”

  Hide and Seek

  “This is not a good idea,” Jazzy pleaded from her wheelchair.

  “So you’ve said,” Lily replied as she pushed her.

  “But I want it on the record,” Jazzy added quickly. “I was wheeled in here against my will, and I’m not in any way involved in this fiasco when you get caught.”

  “If I get caught,” Lily corrected with a grin.

  They were in the lecture hall of Pike U’s history department, the one which Bradley Binns frequented. It was six in the evening, a time when students were not usually found at lectures, and the door to that particular room had been locked when Lily and Jazzy had arrived there. In a fit of fire magic that had inevitably gone awry, Lily had melted the whole metal deadlock away from the wooden door, and now she was slowly beginning to levitate off the ground before Jazzy’s eyes. She could hear her best friend clucking disapproval behind her, even when she was four feet above her little head.

  “Salem said these djinn things live inside the glass,” Lily explained, her voice carrying in the acoustics of the hall. “I want to try and find the panel where I saw that face in September.”

  Jazzy’s disenchantment with the plan was well-founded, Lily had to admit. Aside from knowing that the panel had been on the left-hand side of the ceiling, there were at least forty huge panes of glass making up the roof space that Lily was floating towards. More than that, the ceiling itself must have been thirty feet high, and Lily’s current stretch of ill luck didn’t make the climb a good idea. Still, Lily only had half the answers she needed, and the vision at university was the only thing she could investigate away from the many watchful eyes of the Theatre Imaginique.

  “Nov
el could have done this with you, you know,” Jazzy called, hands cupped to the sides of her mouth. “He’d be much speedier at a getaway, I promise you.”

  And all that Jazzy said was true, but the truth gave Lily a lump in her throat that she had to swallow hard at to remove.

  “He’s keeping me in the dark, like he always does,” Lily replied. “How do I ever learn to face anything if I let him carry on-”

  “What?” Jazzy interjected. “Carrying on protecting you, and saving your life?”

  Lily flapped a hand behind her to hush her friend, whose meek tone had risen to its full maternal volume. It didn’t deter Jazzy from her tirade for one moment.

  “What are you going to do if you find that panel anyway?” she asked. “I reckon your professor might notice if snowflakes start dropping in during his lectures.”

  “I’m not going to take it,” Lily scoffed, “I’m just…”

  But in truth, Lily had no idea what she would do if she did locate the panel in which she’d seen the djinn’s face. She had reached the ceiling during her argument with Jazzy, and now she was floating slowly along the rows of huge glass panes, inspecting each one with narrow, squinting eyes. Most of them were stained on the other side, from the wintery weather that was settling on all of Piketon’s buildings, and a few of them housed cobwebs on the inside. Lily supposed there must have been some mighty-brave spiders around, to live at such a cavernous height. Even knowing she had the power to control her own sense of gravity, Lily found it hard to look down at the massive space below her.

  “You can’t see anything, can you?” Jazzy asked.

  To Lily’s surprise, she didn’t say it with the ‘I told you so’ tone she could have used. Jazzy’s voice had changed in the moments between those words and her last, and she sounded curious, but also a little afraid.

  Lily made her way back along the rows of glass with a frown. She was sure that the haunted panel had been in the middle of the pack somewhere, but the stark winter sun that streamed through the panes was starting to hurt her eyes. In fact, one panel in particular seemed to be deliberately trying to blind her. Wherever she hovered in the space below the ceiling, it appeared to her as a bright white square, without even a trace of the sky visible behind it.

  “Jazzy,” Lily called, her voice shaking, “I think I’ve found it.”

  This was the moment that the door to the lecture hall opened with a crash. The shock of the noise drained Lily’s blood of its power momentarily, and for a few horrible seconds she was falling back towards the floor. A deep breath and a surge of concentration forced her upwards again, all the way up to the glass, where Lily put her back to it and stuck like the spiders she’d been pondering only moments ago. She had no choice then but to look down into the vastness of the hall below, where a sandy-haired man in an ugly knitted vest had entered the room. Lily rolled her eyes at the sight of him as the young man put his hands on his hips.

  “Who are you, and what have you done to my door?” asked Bradley Binns.

  Jazzy was more than smart enough not to look up at the ceiling. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, staring Bradley out with the same motherly admonishment she’d delivered to Lily.

  “Please, Sir,” she reasoned, “do you really think I could have melted your door lock? I just saw it was damaged and I wheeled in to see if anyone was in trouble, that’s all.”

  Jazzy was playing her disabled card for all it was worth, and Lily grinned as the young professor tensed with embarrassment. Even as she felt that moment of mirth, though, a sharp flash of pain ran down each of her arms, her veins there pulsed with the strain of sustaining her gravity to stick to the roof. She was in serious danger of crashing to the ground, right on top of Bradley’s head, if Jazzy couldn’t get rid of him soon.

  “Well, I, er…” The young professor stuttered a great deal, shuffling on his feet. “I didn’t mean to accuse you directly of course.”

  “Even though you did, Sir,” Jazzy replied, arms now folded in superiority.

  “Yes, well,” Bradley answered, “let’s forget I did that, and I’ll say thanks instead, for your… erm… vigilance?”

  Jazzy grinned so widely that Lily could see it from her great height.

  “All right then,” she agreed. “It’s all forgotten.”

  A rapid pulse was thumping in Lily’s head as she watched Bradley turning to leave. She had never had to sustain her powers for this long, not since the time they’d given out when she tried to defend herself against Mother Novel. That encounter had not ended well, and nor would this one if the professor didn’t pick up his feet to leave more swiftly. To Lily’s horror, Bradley was almost back at the destroyed door when he turned again with a fresh look of humiliation on his face.

  “I forgot to get what I came in for,” he mumbled, “excuse me.”

  It might have been funny for Lily to watch the professor fumble, as though he was an intruder in Jazzy’s classroom instead of the other way around, if not for the pain and exhaustion that was flooding every muscle in her body. Lily’s eyes were wide and dry as she stared hard at Bradley, willing him to pick up the papers on his desk and get going out of the room as quickly as he could. Lily realised, too late, that it would have been very good luck if things had been that simple.

  “Pardon me, Sir,” Jazzy said suddenly, “but what’s that?”

  Lily could have screamed from the ceiling at her. Jazzy’s question prompted Bradley to turn yet again and approach her, holding out the paper that he’d just picked up.

  “Oh,” he said with a little chuckle, “some of my students need a new copy of their assignment, the one they were supposed to have finished and handed in to me by tomorrow morning.”

  The brainiacs rolled their eyes together, sharing some great secret about foolish students, and Lily lost her patience, and her strength. She was certain that her gravity magic would give out at any moment, and all she could hope was that she didn’t hurt anyone when she plummeted the thirty feet back to the ground. Jazzy and Bradley were still talking below her, both oblivious to her loss of power, and Lily felt the tightness in her veins fading off as her magic drained to the barest sliver.

  That was when the voice came from behind her. It vibrated against the back of her ear, and the place where she was pressed up against the window grew colder, like someone had slipped a slab of ice down the back of her shirt. Lily knew at once where the voice was coming from, and she knew that in her hurry to hide from Bradley, she’d backed up against the one panel that she would have been too afraid to even touch five minutes ago.

  “Do not seek me, daughter of shades,” the voice whispered. “When it is time, I will seek you.”

  As Bradley Binns exited the lecture hall below, Lily came unstuck from the glass ceiling. The last thing she saw was the floor shooting towards her, ready to make the whole world turn black.

  Healing

  “How can I make you promise me not to keep putting yourself in danger?”

  Novel was talking, and Lily wasn’t certain how long his one-sided conversation had been going on. He’d been talking before, saying something about reserve power, and how it was fortunate that she’d read about that cushioning spell from the Book Of Shade, but now he was in the middle of a different topic. It made Lily think she must have drifted out of consciousness somewhere in between. She could feel a cold cloth being dabbed upon her cheeks and forehead, and the hand that performed the task was gentle and precise.

  “Short of following you around campus all day, which I doubt you’d allow,” Novel continued in a low tone, “I just wish you’d wait for the potioneer. Once we have the right advice on keeping you safe-”

  “Who cursed me?”

  Lily choked out the words, her eyes fluttering open as she spoke. Novel’s look of surprise filled her vision, and the cold cloth was lifted away from her brow. Her view staggered for a moment, as though her eyeballs needed a few seconds to remember how to operate, but then the curtains of the four-pos
ter came into view beyond Novel’s pale face. Lily saw herself reflected in the dark centre of his bright eyes, and she was surprised that she was not a mess of purple bruises. In fact, she looked kind of blue.

  “What do you mean, ‘who’ cursed you?” Novel asked softly.

  Lily shifted, and something hard jostled at her feet. She was able to lift her aching head just enough to see a faint blue glow emanating from beneath the thin black sheets, and her brain kicked into gear as she sensed a strange tingle of power in her veins. Novel had put starlight stones around her – crystals of quartz in which he had captured the powerful light of the night sky – and she was healing even as she lay sleeping. Lily moved again, feeling more stones lined up behind her back on the mattress, and she gave Novel a faint smile as his question sunk in to her slowly-waking mind.

  “Creatures that dwell within enchanted glass,” Lily whispered, echoing the memory of what Salem had told her. “Which one did it, do you know?”

  The illusionist looked affronted. Lily could see it in the way his brow became stern for only a handful of tense seconds. Novel’s temper was still there, even beneath his caring gestures, and Lily half-expected him to demand where she’d got her information from. He was silent for a moment, frowning down at the cloth in his hands, but then he sighed loudly, and simply shook his head.

  “Wait for the potioneer,” he said again, “and don’t put yourself in these awful situations until then.”

  Novel either didn’t know the answer, or he wasn’t telling. In her exhausted state, Lily chose to believe the first option, and she reached out for one of his arms to guide the soothing cloth back to her brow.

  “I feel all broken,” she whispered, “come and fix me.”

  Lily’s eyes flickered closed, and she felt the cool compress travel around her face. Between every dab of the soft, chilly fabric, a warm-lipped kiss hit the very same spot. Lily smiled, and a deep relief settled her shaking heart, her hands reaching blindly to touch Novel’s arms, his chest, his neck. Anywhere that she could reach him felt good, and he was by her side, right where he belonged.