Page 52

Keane

Oil. Always oil now, sliding through my thoughts, making everything distant and wrong. Uncle’s voice echoed in the spaces between spaces, commanding through corrupted wellspring energy.

Show me what she found in the research.

Memory flickered—Marigold’s face crumpling as I took her father’s last warnings. Her hand reaching for me as corrupted portals pulled us apart. My body moving like a puppet while something inside screamed against the wrongness.

Wisp? Where was Wisp?

A flicker of pure blue light in the corner of my vision. My familiar trying to reach me through the corruption. But Uncle’s tainted magic ran too deep, poisoning everything it touched.

That wasn’t what Uncle wanted. Strength above all else. He thought the corruption was a tool to wield, not a sickness eating through the magic at its source.

Good boy. Just like we practiced, with the controlled energy.

But he was wrong. He didn’t understand what was happening to me, what this taint truly was. Or maybe he did—and he didn’t care. Maybe he thought sacrificing me was a fair price to unlock this new power.

Wisp pressed closer, her form barely visible through the taint. Trying to remind me of something. Someone.

Brown eyes filled with tears. Honey-blonde hair catching starlight. Teaching her about natural portal magic in the library. Kissing her beneath falling stars while our magic flowed clean and true.

She makes your magic weak. Natural. Uncontrolled.

“No.” The word came out broken, the first thing I’d said of my own will in… how long? Days? Weeks?

Pain lanced through my temples as Uncle’s corrupted magic tightened. But Wisp surged forward, lending me pure wellspring strength.

More fragments broke through the wrongness. Cyrus’s flames turning that impossible blue where they met Marigold’s necromancy. Elio’s illusions gaining substance as her clean power touched them. The three of them defending Wickem while I… while I…

You belong to the controlled power now. To us.

But other memories fought back. Mother teaching me how magic should flow naturally, like clear water. Father’s gentle corrections when my portals wavered between spaces. Their faces the day before they died, worried and determined.

Had they fought this too? This oily wrongness in their thoughts, this corruption of pure magic?

Wisp’s form stabilized slightly, showing me images through its spectral windows. Marigold working with Cyrus and Elio, their magic harmonizing naturally. The way they’d looked at me during the vampire attack—not with hatred, but with determination to save me from the corruption.

They weren’t just searching for me. They were preparing for something bigger. But they didn’t know. They couldn’t.

If they understood what I’d become, what was inside me, they wouldn’t be fighting to bring me back. They’d be fighting to stop me.

Duty. The word triggered something. A memory of Mother’s voice: “True magic isn’t about control, love. It’s about letting power flow naturally.”

Flow.

The corruption cracked slightly. Wisp pressed into the gap, its clean warmth fighting the wrongness.

I pushed against Uncle’s presence in my mind. “Get OUT!”

Pain exploded behind my eyes. The portals around me shuddered, their edges jagged with that oily darkness.

You can’t fight this, boy. It runs too deep.

He was right. I could feel it poisoning my bones, my magic. But Wisp showed me something else—Marigold refusing to give up on me. Cyrus and Elio putting their animosity aside to help her. The way our magic had flowed together during the trials, before the corruption.

The way it could flow again. If I chose it.

I opened a portal—a real one, edges clean and silver like water. Through it, I glimpsed Marigold in Elio’s sanctuary, their heads bent together over maps. Searching for me. Planning some kind of rescue. But they didn’t know.

Pain lanced through my skull. Flashes of old therapy sessions. Questions I’d asked but wasn’t allowed to remember.

Who else knew?

What did my parents—

The Last—

The thought shattered before I could grasp it, drowned under Uncle’s control.

Wisp’s form solidified fully as my own will crystallized. We couldn’t break Uncle’s corruption completely—not yet. But we could fight it. Could choose, moment by moment, to be more than his tool for poisoning magic itself.

We could choose them. Even after Uncle used me to lure her into the vampire attack. Even knowing how much that betrayal must have hurt.

The corruption would return. The taint ran too deep to escape alone. But I wasn’t alone anymore.

I had Wisp. Had hope.

Had a reason to fight back.