Page 114 of A Winding Wave of Magic
Lynch looks like he wants to be sick. “That’s enough chitchat. You know what I want. I’m not leaving until I get it.”
Penny blinks. Once she knew. Now, no more. But she does know one thing. “It’s not here. It never was. And you’ll never find it now.”
This she knows to be true down to her bones, though she has no clue what she’s talking about. Not anymore.
The wrinkled folds of Lynch’s ancient face quiver, slowly flushing the color of a newly formed bruise as anger rushes in.
“Are you sure about that, Penny?” he says in a voice as low as the wind. “Last chance.”
“We can’t escape our fates, Caleb. And this was always mine.”
“Have it your way.Audi me lapisis!”
Out of the stone counter springs a pair of hands that clamp Penny’s arms and slam them to the hard granite. The hands grow, ghosts of their mother stone, but no less powerful as they slide around her back, her neck, even her stomach, binding her in place.
And then, they squeeze.
“Caleb,” Penny chokes. “Please! I cannot breathe.”
“You just have to tell me, Penny.” The sorcerer hobbles beside her and sets his palm on the back of her head. His eyes,once blacker than night, blaze as bright as a fire as he removes a vial from his jacket and sets it on the stone.
Penny feels some nameless part of her brain, her spirit, her soul tear open.
The hands around her neck tighten, and the other at the back of her head throbs with power.
Lynch begins to speak in a different tongue, an old tongue from memories that Penny once knew but hasn’t heard for uncountable years. Her mind is a wardrobe that’s been torn open, clothes tossed about, ragged and rumpled all over the floor. Then, one by one, each article of clothing, each memory she has kept for herself, changes somehow. Every solid sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch morphs into something liquid. Lynch continues his horrible chant, and the memories slitheracross the stone, dripping to the floor like melted wax, then vanishing completely.
“Where is it?” Lynch hisses. “Give me the Secret, you horrid witch! I need the Secret!”
Faces Penny once knew. Oh, that girl. With the red hair whom she loved so much. Another with black hair and eyes like water. Built from her own heart, she was.
They fall to the cedar floors too, exploding into vapor, unwilling to be caught.
Lynch roars.
Ciarán, I’m coming.
“You’ll never find it,” Penny chokes out. And then, from the depths of her subconscious where not even her magic could reach: “No one is supposed to live forever.”
The sorcerer rages. His grip turns to steel.
The memories flood the floor.
The witch’s eyes roll back into her head.
Oh, Ciarán, she thinks as her lover’s strong face floats out and away. I shall see you soon, my love.
And then she knows his name no more.
She knows nothing at all.
Not even the name of Death.
The vision disappeared as soonas Sybil dropped my hand, and I released Jonathan’s as well. My mother, on the other hand, stared up at the ceiling, eyes turned milky white as she keened softly toward the recessed lights.
“Christ,” muttered Jonathan as he watched her, then surreptitiously crossed himself.
“Really?” I asked him.
