Page 12 of All Out of Flux (Stolen Hearts #3)

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M y blood thumped in my ears, the thunder of my pulse like the ticking of a clock. But now the clocks had stopped, and we were still caught within the Quartz Spider’s blast zone.

I couldn’t keep my mind off the three Brillante goons from the Habibi parking lot. They’d disintegrated into piles of dust, the Quartz Spider accelerating time in an isolated space, aging them decades, if not centuries within the blink of an eye.

My breath came in ragged spurts, my legs pumping as I dragged Leon by the hand behind me, as Guillotina did the same with his other arm. My fault. All my fault, this hubris of coming to see Tío Gustavo, of secretly believing he valued me too much to really hurt me or anyone I cared about. Yet somehow I’d forgotten about the greatest actual threat to Dos Lunas, to me, to the people I loved.

“Show yourself,” I shouted, furious at him, furious at myself. “Show yourself and fight fair for once in your sorry life.”

In a movie, in an epic, sweeping story, this would be the part where the villain made his grand appearance, sweeping in to punish me for speaking out of turn, to gloat about his evil plan. But the spiders were different. This spider, more so, preferred to work subtly, tugging at invisible strings.

“Where are you?” Guillotina shouted, wanting to bait the spider as badly as I did. “Step into the light and fight like a man.”

No answer. Total silence. And that made him so much more dangerous. It wasn’t cowardice that kept him in the shadows, more his awareness that he could gain and maintain the upper hand by keeping his cards close to his chest. Everything we knew about Brendan Shum had been learned through research, interrogation, observation. Here was a bad guy who wasn’t prone to delivering evil monologues, and my God was it going to drive me crazy.

That tiny, awful detail about why he’d wanted two Aqueous Elixirs for himself, for example. Not for the precious liquid held within, but for the bottles themselves, each serving as one half of a strange, deconstructed hourglass.

What did he stand to gain from haunting our meeting with Tío Gustavo? The statuette was useless to him — the statuette that was no doubt absorbing the nervous sweat of my hand still gripping it tight. Who knew if sweat stains would decrease the value of our reward from Vera’s client? If it came down to it, I would gladly use the statuette as a blunt weapon, bring it crashing down upon the Quartz Spider’s head.

If only we knew where the fuck he was. I glanced over my shoulder, checking to see that Leon and Guillotina were still running with me, gauging how far we’d actually run from the warehouse, if it was safe to stop.

Horror clenched at my stomach, twisting as if my intestines were caught in the grasp of ice-cold fingers. We’d barely made it away from the warehouse, like we’d spent all our time running on an invisible treadmill. But how? My legs were on fire, my lungs so starved for breath it felt like I’d been shredded from the inside.

“He caught us,” Leon cried out. “We’re stuck in one of his anomalies.”

We stopped running, then, muscles begging for mercy. I nearly fell to my knees, swallowing huge gulps of breath.

Guillotina turned in a slow circle, glaring at the darkness, chest heaving as she caught her breath. “That — that rat fucker. That absolute bastard. Where the fuck are you, Shum?”

“We can’t give up,” Leon muttered, his fingers clenched, eyes searching the night. “Blow it all up, if that’s what it takes to stop this. I’ll call the dragons if I have to.”

“Don’t,” I barked, my hand squeezing over his. I didn’t say the rest, feeling horrible for just thinking it — that maybe, at worst, as a last resort. Only then should he consider the dragons.

Guillotina shrugged off her jacket, tossing it onto the grass. “This isn’t over, Shum. Come out. Wherever you are. Just you and me. I’ll enjoy breaking every single bone in your body.”

And there it was at last, a blur of motion in the darkness, something stepping out of the shadows. The Quartz Spider wore the same crystalline goggles as the night we first encountered him, the same iridescent oil-slick garb that helped him blend into shadows, and yet marked him as something unnatural. Supernatural. In strange, jerking movements, parts of him slipping in and out of the currents of time, he approached.

“You don’t actually want us dead,” Leon said. “Not really.”

I wondered how he came to that conclusion, whether this was only Leon’s attempt at delaying the worst. But there was a ring of truth to it. Even with the deadliest of his anomalies, the Quartz Spider had always left the tiniest openings in his plans, little gaps that allowed us to get away and live. Why?

The Quartz Spider pulled the mask off his head, his hair falling in wisps over his eyes. Handsome as ever, handsome as before, and yet he looked even older somehow. He hadn’t aged at all, not really, but the hollows under his eyes seemed even deeper, the stubble on his chin both thicker and grayer.

“It’s never been about killing you,” the Quartz Spider said. “That wouldn’t accomplish anything. Not really. And why would I kill the people who’ve helped me the most?”

I gritted my teeth. And help him we did, always through some twisted accident, whether it was by allowing that pouch of quickening sand to fall into his clutches, or by losing both the Aqueous Elixirs to him and his trickery.

“You tried to kill us,” I said, thrusting an accusing finger at his face. “Back at Habibi.”

His lips pressed into a tight line, his eyes going distant. “Habibi?”

I threw my hands up. Why was he playing with us? Always with these games. “The Amethyst Spider’s club. His home bar? Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of it.”

Brendan shook his head. “I know about the Amethyst Spider, and I know where he conducts his — his business. But I haven’t been near Habibi in ages. I have no business with Faizan.”

“Then you deny it.” Leon stepped forward, his fists shaking at his sides. “Just earlier tonight. Three Brillante thugs, all of them turned to dust when you triggered your anomaly. You froze time around them, then you sped it up and murdered them. Just like that. Why?”

Again Brendan shook his head. “I have no recollection of any of this. If I killed someone — if I killed three people, and tonight, as you put it — I certainly would have remembered.” His gaze fell to the ground. “I always remember.”

Guillotina rolled her eyes and groaned. “He’s lost the plot, or he never had it to begin with. That’s what we get for trying to reason with killers. Come on, Shum. You and me. I’d love to get a turn before the Masques come and haul you away for good.”

The Quartz Spider snapped his fingers. Tina disappeared, the only trace of her existence a blur in the darkness, like her entire body had been made of wet paint, nothing but a smear across a blackened canvas.

I lunged forward, stopping only because Leon was holding me back. “You fucking monster. What did you do to her?”

Brendan shrugged. “Sent her back in time, but at a much faster pace than the human body is used to. But she’s conditioned to the influence of magic, isn’t she? Your friend will be fine.”

My mouth hung open in horror. Tina was going through the motions of her day in reverse, everything happening backward, and there was nothing she could do to break out of it. All the warnings were true, and they were never enough. Time magic was far deadlier than anyone realized.

“In a few minutes, she’ll be back in bed, exactly as she was this morning,” Brendan said, pulling off one glove, inspecting his fingernails. “And tomorrow, she’ll wake up refreshed, as if nothing had happened. Well, provided a truck doesn’t run her over between here and her apartment.”

My hand went to his face, pointing, accusing. “If anything happens to Guillotina, I will make sure you live to regret it.”

“You could have killed us,” Leon said. “Multiple times you could have ended us, and yet you didn’t. I’m asking you again. Why?”

Brendan Shum tilted his head back and sighed, curls of misty air rolling from his nostrils, tumbling like dragon smoke. The stars reflected in his eyes, twinkling, distant pinpoints. Again I considered how he could have become an actor or a model if he wasn’t so committed to being a total psycho.

“This was never about killing, you understand? Any steps I’ve ever taken to neutralize you and your friends — that’s all it was. To remove you from the situation so I could carry on with my work. I would, however, argue that it has everything to do with death.”

I didn’t react quickly enough. The sudden cessation of pressure from Leon’s muscles should have clued me in. He nudged me out of the way, practically stomping up to Brendan Shum, the two of them almost face to face.

“What the fuck are we doing here? You keep going on and on with your cryptic bullshit. Meanwhile, the rest of the magical community in Dos Lunas is supposed to just follow you around and clean up your mess.”

Brendan’s forehead creased with thought. I reached a hand out to paw at Leon’s back. He shrugged me away.

“Leon,” I said, tautening my voice with warning. “Get back here. Calm down, buddy.”

“No, I will not calm down. He’s put us and our friends into too many dangerous situations already, and it is pissing me the fuck off not knowing what it’s all for. Why do you do the things you do? Who is this for? What is this for?”

Then came the shove, both of Leon’s palms slamming against the Quartz Spider’s chest. The look of somber introspection on his face quickly turned to anger.

“Will you knock off the brooding supervillain schtick already? No one’s buying it. Speak up. Fucking say something.”

“Leon,” I said, stepping forward, swiping to grab at the back of his shirt, to pull him away.

“Enough.”

Brendan Shum clicked his fingers. My hand closed around thin air. Leon was gone. I snarled, throwing myself at Brendan, ready to rip his face off.

But I never made impact. I shouted at him in confusion, never hearing the sound of my own voice. Again and again my feet left the ground as I made a running leap, and my fist never connected with his face.

Yet I felt every shudder in my bones, the tensing of all the muscles in my body as it went through the same motions again and again. My momentum all running on adrenaline and rage, my heart thumping so loud I could hear it in my ears — over and over and over.

“I can keep this going,” Brendan said, sweeping his hand left, then right, like he was swiping on the screen of some invisible device, scrubbing and scanning to rewind my place in time. “We can do this over and over again until your bones splinter from the impact, or your body starves for breath, or your heart gives out. Whichever comes first.”

Warm wetness dripped down my chin, tears of anger and frustration. “Where did you take him?” I shouted, without words, without voice. “Where did you take him?”

“He’s safe,” Brendan said. “Somewhere the two of us can speak without interruption, without angry, overprotective boyfriends getting in the way.”

That time my arm slugged so hard a stab of pain erupted in my shoulder’s socket. How much longer could I keep this up?

Without another word, the Quartz Spider slipped into darkness, vanishing into the night. And I screamed, and ran, and screamed, and no one was there to listen.