Emma inhaled deeply, looking at the spot which she thought would be the best for the act she was about to commit now.
She looked at her outstretched hands, turned them over and looked at her whitish palms. She wasn’t sure what to do, but just like she had traced the mage out of a whim, so she would do this. There was no other choice. She had to find the person that had been trailing them all this while. She wouldn’t be able to survive otherwise, didn’t think her sister or Prescott would either.
Letting out a breath of ‘let’s do this’, she slowly sat down on the grassy path, an undertone made from Prescott’s magic, when he had made a shade for them. Emma was still amazed at the sheer size of the tree at the realness of it. She pondered, as she tried to center herself, if the tree would hold when they left, or disappear into the nothingness it had come from.
Deep breath in and out. She commanded her nostrils, crossing her legs on each other, and palming her hands together before her face like a Buddhist would.
“You can do this, Emma. Just reach out as you had done before.” She muttered to herself, as she repeatedly inhaled and exhaled softly to aid centering herself. Three lives depends on you.
Emma knew when she left her conscious state, knew when she reached out into the bottomless black pit that was the stay of her power to ask for aid. She watched it open up to her, watched it fill her spirit up, and push her toward the direction she needed to go.
There was no sign of suprise when she found the mage’s touch on her. She had suspected it for a while, she hadn’t just thought it reasonable-had chosen to deal with it when they had gotten to their destination-until Annabel had mentioned the possibility of another week on the road, and Prescott had looked like a ghost of himself.
Subtly, she watched the mage’s touch-it was like a taint, a black shady taint on one of her brain cells. She almost killed this connection, but for the sudden thought that occurred to her.
Hesitating only for a second, she touched the taint, choosing to know where the mage was, before removing his taint from her. Was he the one tailing them? Was he alone, or was he with someone else?
Emma knew that the path she was about to embark on was dangerous; knew that if things went south she might not come back the same; and so she commanded another dose of power into her spirit from the bottomless pit, getting disoriented when the requested amount hit her fair and square.
She really needed to train to master these abilities. Emma concluded. Another dose of that, and she might have lost control of herself, she might be lost in herself. What happens then?
When she balanced herself and her emotions, she cocooned the touch with an embalm of white light, and allowed herself to be carried away into the mind, and into the vicinity of the mage.
It didn’t take long and she was seeing the mage heading toward the last two villages they had just past through; she was seeing him in totality; she was seeing him clearly for who he was.
The was not just a dark mage, a specie of mage known for their darkness-Annabel to the best of her ability, considering their situations, had given certain information that the latter had believed would be of help to her if she knew. He was also someone that she knew.
Even though the dark mage was wearing a black cloak that left nothing to be seen to those around him, Emma could see his face. He was her foster father’s associate, or rather a boss when it came to the chain of the business. His company was the greatest in the whole of America, but for some reason he had taken a liking to her father, Jason, and his small business. Now, she could understand the favoritism. The irony was almost laughable.
She had always belived that mages, witches and others in line with that, lived peacefully in villages, in communities. She never thought they would be interested in heading a corporation whose annual revenue was more than most third world countries.
Had he used dark magic to cause his business to thrive? Emma wouldn’t be surprised. Why stress, when you have magic?
Her wiry humor was dampened when she imagined the number of deaths he must have caused to enrich himself, the number of deaths he had blamed on something or someone else.
She still remembered one of the cases that had even gotten the attention of the national press; a skyscraper which his workers had been working on, had suddenly collapsed killing more than a hundred people. Seeing the evil swirling around his spirit, she knew he had been behind it.
All those lives…Emma shook the emotion of pity off herself immediately. She needed to concentrate. If the mage should feel pity within him, something not akin to his kind, he would know he was being invaded. She didn’t want to imagine what would happen then. She had to remain as aloof as ever, as cold as ever, just as he was inside.
Mr Slediv Santerv.
She had always been curious about where he was from, considering his name sounded Russian, and then Italian at the same time.
Mr Slediv Santerv.
Emma pondered on the name now, wondering why her heart seemed to be pointing at something about it. But nothing was coming up after a while. She decided that she would revisit it when she returned back to her own body.
She was just about to do exactly that, so that she could quench the taint, having seen and known a lot than she had bargained for, when she saw the companion of the mage.
Casper?
She staggered as a spirit.
The shock outrode her emotion of coldness; so much tangible was it that the mage’s spirit recoiled from such an unwarranted emotion.
When Slediv stopped, Emma knew that her time to leave had come. Quickly, she zapped away from the mage’s consciousness, back into hers. And with infinite accuracy, she rendered the mage’s taint on her brain cell useless with just a bout of white light that oozed from herself. And then she destroyed what remained of the pathway that sourced her journey to Slediv, so that he wouldn’t be able to trace her again.
When she was sure that her inner being was pristine clean, she calmly returned to her consciousness, to her flesh which was attuned to the environment around her.
When Emma opened her eyes, the first thing she noticed was Prescott lying facing down on the ground, a few feet away from her, with Annabel next to him.
Did something happen? Her heart fell into her stomach then, especially when she heard them not breathing.
She swerved from the heartbreaking picture when she heard Amelia’s unnatural grunts.
“You think that you are wise?” She heard Amelia say, and knew that Slediv had finally gotten to her sister.
Without much ado, she stood up from her position, and stepped toward her sister who looked paler than death. She needed to save the latter. But how?
She watched calmly, even though its opposite was what was going on inside her, as Amelia staggered toward her; a puppet in its full sense. Could she still be saved?
“You think you are wise invading my system? You think I wouldn’t notice?”
Emma would have loved to trade words with the mage, but she knew, from Annabel’s little coaching, that the more she bantered with a puppet, the more the puppet was ensnared into the master’s web. Long intervals wouid mean the total annihilation of the puppet’s will. She couldn’t let that happen, neither could she let Prescott and Annabel die.
“What did you do to them?”
Amelia looked at the duo on the floor and snorted. “Just a knock out. They didn’t even put up a fight. Although, I will have to say that seeing a squirrel advanced in magic is a new thing. How had that even happened?”
Emma ignored the question, sighing in relief rather that her friends are okay. She could resuscitate them. She just needed to get Amelia away from the grasp of the mage.
“You know, maybe I will take it with me, after I’m done with you. You can surrender immediately, or I can take you the hard way; that I’m in a puppet’s body doesn’t reduce my power in any way.” Amelia gritted out, already sporting a ball of floating ice in one hand, and a sword on another.
A sword? What for? Emma wondered, still standing at the same spot. She knew that the mage wanted her alive, so the sword wasn’t to kill. It was for something else. She didn’t know the intent of the sword specifically, but she knew that she didn’t want it to touch her.
Help me. She muttered into the bottomless pit, already honing its power.