Magic to the Bone (2 page)

“Why didn’t you just
explain that before you left?” I made a face at him.

He lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “I did.”

I started to argue, then shut my mouth. There wasn’t a point.

“So,” I said instead, eager for something that wasn’t solitaire and brooding, “what’s in the bag?”

The grocery bag had food, shockingly enough. Despite my raging curiosity about the mysteriously plain leather pouch, I managed to
sit quietly enough and eat the sandwich Ash had brought for me. He even knew I liked root beer. It was endearing, if a little creepy.

We finished, putting the wrappers back into the bag. I wondered what trash service in the Veil was like, but resisted saying that out loud also. I might’ve not had my magic back, but I was gaining über levels in shutting up and patience. Life skills. Really. I
watched silently as Ash opened the leather bag. I didn’t know what I’d hoped for, but a small silver cup, a vial of green liquid, and a bunch of assorted roots wasn’t exactly exciting.

“Wazzat?” I asked. “Looks like spell ingredients, I suppose?”

“I’m a dragon, not a witch,” Ash said with a half-smile. “But you aren’t far off. I’m going to make tea. Then you will drink it.”

“Tea? Your solution
is tea?” I crossed my arms and swallowed a nervous chuckle.

“It’s more like poison. If you were human or even shifter, it would kill you.” Ash pulled out a small folding knife, unfolded it, and started shaving slivers off the various roots and into the silver cup.

“You are going to poison me?” There was no holding back my incredulous laugh now. “That’s…” I trailed off. Maybe it was brilliant.
If my body had to fight off the poison, maybe it would unblock my magic while it did so. For a moment I was totally on board with this crazy plan, but then reality crashed in.

“Wait,” I said. “That’s not going to work. Remember Lucy? She damn near bit me in half. If that didn’t wake up my magic to help me heal, I don’t think poison will do it.” His snake-shaped Guardian had nearly killed me and
I was still magicless.

Ash’s dark brows knitted together and then he chuckled. “No, not poisoning you so that you’ll heal, though I can see why you thought that. This tea pulls the inside to the outside.”

That sounded really disgusting. I pictured my skin turning inside out and my guts prolapsing. He laughed outright at my look of horror.

“Inside, in a metaphysical sense,” he added as he went
back to his work. “It should, if it works, show you what has been lost and give a path to get it back.”

I pushed aside thoughts of being turned inside out and focused on what he was saying. Finding my lost magic was good. But…
wait a minute
.

“Seriously?” I said. “Like, seriously?”

“What?” Ash asked, looking up from his concoction.

“My dragon-mentor secret father is mixing up a poison drug
to send his Native American sorceress daughter on a fucking vision quest.” I leaned back in my chair and pressed my lips together.

“Perhaps you’ll meet your spirit animal,” Ash said.

I made a face at him, but something about those specific words bothered me. Spirit animal. For a moment, I almost remembered something, but it flitted away from my active thoughts before I could catch it, leaving
a weirdly aching emptiness behind. Perhaps Ash was right. Perhaps I had somehow forgotten or lost something essential to myself, to my magic. I decided to shut up and let him work.

When it was done steeping, the poison tea looked like sunshine in a cup. It also smelled like overripe bananas and sadness. I really, really,
really
didn’t want to put that in my mouth.

Too bad I didn’t have a choice.
It was time to suck it up and be an adult. And sometimes that meant doing things because they had to get done. Like taxes and standing in line at the DMV.

So I adulted the fuck up and lifted the cup of poison. “Sláinte mhaith,” I said with a grimace. Then I drank it down.

Worst. Shot. Ever.

“Do I get a chaser?” I gasped, eyes watering as my throat burned enough that I wondered how flames didn’t
accompany the words out of my mouth.

“Best not to drink anything else with it, sorry.” Ash caught my elbow as I stumbled sideways.

The room was tipping, though I knew in some corner of my brain that it was me falling. The rug looked nice, a swirl of sky blue and grass green knotted into the cheerful yellows. It looked nice, but it was sure coming at my face really fast.

My father caught me
before I bruised the rug. I lay in his arms in agony. Inside my head weird images formed. It seemed as if a flaming Zerg army was spawning inside me and swarming through my limbs. Just when I was ready to cede the whole planet formerly known as Jade to the Queen of Blades, the swarm leapt into a Nydus worm and my mind cleared.

My belly was still on fire, but it was at “shouldn’t have left the
seeds in that jalapeño” levels instead of “I just inhaled a field of ghost pepper” levels. I struggled to sit up, and Ash let me.

“I saw a vision of a computer game,” I said. “I don’t think this is working.”

“Hold on to whatever you saw, no matter how strange,” Ash said. “Come with me.”

He helped me up. My legs were rubber but not on fire, so I managed to stand without leaning too heavily on
him. I followed him to the cabin door.

It was broad daylight outside. The white sun hung at zenith and the sky was perfectly azure. Golden grass waved in the never-ending breeze. More of my head fog cleared in the fresh air and I sucked down a breath full of summer warmth and the scent of ripe hay.

“Ah, well,” Ash said. “I thought I felt a change. Perhaps not.”

“Um,” I said. “What about that?”
I pointed to the left of the cabin.

For the last week, the landscape had always been unbroken rolling hills of grass, as far as my eye could see. Now there was a big bare patch with a mounded lump of earth in the middle only steps away from the cabin. I walked toward it. The mound had an opening, like a burial barrow or a giant ant nest. Not quite a Nydus and I was nothing but glad about that.

“What about what?” Ash said. Curiosity gleamed in his eyes.

I described what I saw and he nodded, back in contemplative dragon mentor mode.

“Let me guess,” I said. “I’m supposed to go in there?”

Ash shrugged, but I was already moving. The poison had brought me to this place. The key to unblocking my magic and defeating Samir could be down there. If I wanted to save my friends, if I wanted to
ever be with Alek again, to be safe and happy again…

No choice. Not really.

I walked forward and let the earth swallow me.

Two steps in, I fell down the rabbit hole. Well, maybe less a rabbit hole than dropping into freefall in a moist, nearly airless tunnel. I stretched my fingertips out but couldn’t find walls. This was going to be the worst quest ever if I ended up a pancake at the bottom. Worst in many ways, not least of which was that I wouldn’t die.

Anyone who says flying is just like falling but without
the sudden stop at the end has never fallen very far or flown much, that’s all I’m saying.

There was no sudden stop. One moment I was falling and trying to distract my fear-soaked brain with remembering what the terminal velocity for a human was. The next, I was on my hands and knees in a rough-hewn tunnel. The ground was rocky with a thick layer of coarse dust over it. Dust and musty air tickled
my nose. A soft blue glow emanated from around me like an aura. I looked down and realized I wasn’t on my hands and knees after all.

I had no hands. Just paws. Huge black paws that were glowing pale blue. They were almost like a wolf’s paws, but as I raised one to examine it, sitting back on my haunches for balance, I realized I had retractable claws. Some kind of panther then? I wasn’t sure.
Twisting my head revealed a long, furry body that ended in a very long tail that was definitely catlike. If my fur hadn’t been black, I would have guessed snow leopard based on that tail. Weird.

Guess I’d found my spirit animal after all. Un-fucking-believable.

The tunnel stretched out ahead and behind me, so I arbitrarily chose the direction I’d been facing as the one to go in. I was on a quest,
after all. No lollygagging.

The tunnel split into three, all descending. It reminded me of a mine shaft, though there were no tracks, just thick dust and rock beneath my paws. The dream version of a mine shaft, perhaps. I froze as I heard footsteps coming from the middle corridor. There was nowhere to hide, so I moved into the opening of one of the side tunnels. Not that anyone coming could fail
to miss the huge glowing panther-cat thing.

Two teenage boys in dirty jeans and flannel shirts picked their way to the intersection, both holding flashlights. The yellow light glinted off their black ponytails and their wide, nervous eyes. I recognized them as they stopped at the crossroads and turned. John and Connor. My cousins.

I hadn’t thought about them since I was dealing with Not Afraid.
I had no idea why they would be here now. They had nothing to do with my magic or the loss of it. What the frak had been in that cup?

They scented the air and John pointed to the way I’d come. “That way,” he said.

“We’re supposed to collapse the tunnel,” Connor said. He rubbed his free hand on his jeans and looked back the way they had come.

“She’s got no light,” John said. “She’s got no nose
for this. No way she gets out. This place is rotten, but it could take us forever to collapse it. We’ll just close up the front, okay? I mean, what if we brought it down on ourselves?” He peered up at the wooden supports.

“Sky Heart said—” Connor started to say.

“He ain’t here. He won’t know. We did what he said. She won’t make it out of here. Come on, before we lose the light.”

Sky Heart.
At the sound of my grandfather’s name, I growled. I couldn’t help it. Neither one of them seemed to be able to see me, but at the growl they both whipped their heads around, eyes searching the corridors. They still couldn’t see me, I realized, as their eyes passed over me, unfocused and terrified.

“Okay, let’s go.” Connor led the way, and they disappeared into the damp darkness.

Sky Heart had
killed a lot of people, most of them children. I wondered whom he had told them to abandon here, and why. His preferred method had been to throw them off a cliff if they didn’t become crow shifters. Was this the past? My cousins had looked early teens, which meant I was still living at Three Feathers among the People. I’d be just a little kid at this point.

That thought poked at the weird, empty
space I’d sensed earlier while Ash was brewing his magic potion. Again I couldn’t grasp it. But this was what I was shown, so it must be important.

I went down the path my cousins had taken. I wanted to see whom they had left, though I was beginning to suspect I knew. But I couldn’t
remember
. I reached for other memories of my childhood. My mother singing. The smell of the kitchen on baking day.
How the quilt on my bed had a bright purple satin patch that I loved to stroke over and over, until I’d worn a hole in it. I’d cried until Mom had patched it with another piece, and Jasper, the man I’d thought was my father, had told her she spoiled me.

So, at least there was that. I remembered childhood, including the worse parts that came later. Including never fitting in, never being quite
like everyone else.

The shaft grew tighter and closer, the air so stale that my lungs labored to draw enough in to support my huge body. It branched again, going down and down, and I followed pure instinct now. This was very like a bad dream, and I trusted that every road would lead wherever it wanted me to go. There was no way out but through.

Eventually I heard a child sobbing. I followed
that noise through the all-encompassing dark and found a little girl. Blood ran from a cut on her head, matting her dark, filthy hair. She sat curled against the wall, her arms wrapped around skinny knees. Her brown eyes were puffy from tears. One shoe was untied. She couldn’t have been older than four or five.

But I knew that she was four. I knew because some of that empty space filled in.

I was in the mine near Three Feathers. That little girl was me, Jade Crow, age four. I remembered now my cousins leading me down, teasing me that I was afraid of the dark, that I was too little to come on such a grand adventure. I remembered those hours stuck in the darkness, all alone and sure I was going to stay here forever.

I couldn’t remember how I got out. That piece of memory eluded me,
as impossible to grab as a handful of cloud.

Baby Jade stopped sobbing and stared at me in shock. She could see me; that was very clear. She hiccupped and curled tighter as though her knobby knees would shield her from the giant cat beast. I crouched down, putting my belly on the cold floor, and tried to look as unthreatening as possible. Carefully I slunk toward her on my belly, stretching out
my head. A soft whine escaped my throat.

She held still, watching me with eyes that seemed to glow as they reflected the blue light radiating from my body. Just before I reached her, the ground between us split open, a seam of pure silver running like a river, dividing us. My paw touched it and the universe opened to me.