“Where are you going?” Brenna asked.
“I need to pick up something. I’ll meet you back at the apartment.”
The others continued their walk onward. There was a strange feeling in the city tonight. The presence of the dark sorcery was all around them. Even in the city’s usual dingy vibe, it seemed much more dismal and petulant, almost like the streets knew they were infected with some invisible scourge. There were several people on the streets, many coughing and looking pretty sickly. Some sounded like they should really be home in bed.
“Is this from—” Brenna started to ask.
“Yes,” Leif said before letting her continue. “This is from the dark sorcery. The plague it is causing is making people sick.”
“But I thought the sorcery was magic. This doesn’t look like magic; it looks like disease.”
“Magic can affect all things. The human body is no exception. The dark sorcery has infiltrated every realm, as far as I can tell. The effects will be different on the immortals, but there will still be effects, and they will still be dire. This is only the beginning.”
The door to the alchemist’s house was locked, so Erik had to break a window to get inside. The sound of the smashing glass made Jerrik jump. He had frozen time inside the little dwelling to keep the sickening magic out. He hadn’t been fast enough to save the alchemist, but he had been quick enough to save Colby and himself. Colby sat in a suspended state on the bed. The pausing of time didn’t affect Jerrik, but it did stop everything else inside the building. When he saw Erik crawl through the window, he legitimately thought he was hallucinating.
“Erik?” he said with doubt as he squinted his eyes together, thinking it was an illusion. “What the hell?”
“Hi,” Erik said as though there was nothing unusual about seeing your dead friend climbing through a window. “What are you doing here?”
Jerrik laughed. “You’re asking me what I’m doing here? You’re the one who died.”
“True,” Erik said as he laughed too. “I’ve been in Valhalla, came back to help you guys out with this dark sorcery stuff. Also, I missed you guys and wanted to let you know I was still around somewhere in the universe.”
Jerrik shook his hand and gave him a brotherly pat on the back as he smiled. “Well, I’m glad you’re here. How’d you get past that magic outside? It was creeping into the house, even killed the alchemist.” He pointed to the poor old man who laid dead on the floor beside the bed.
“Seems like it comes in waves,” Erik answered. “Not sure what the rhyme or reason is to it yet. I just hope the others can make it back to the apartment before the next wave of it hits. We need to get going. Can you uh, un-freeze him?” Erik pointed to Colby on the bed,
If Jerrik was surprised to see Erik’s sudden appearance, Colby was ten times more shocked when Jerrik snapped time back from its pause and he saw Erik standing right in front of him.
“What the—”
“Yeah, I know,” Jerrik laughed. “Erik has the shock-effect down tight.”
Colby was well enough now to travel, and after a few words were exchanged, the three of them headed out for the apartment to meet up with the others.
On their way out the door, Jerrik took a few of the herbs and trinkets from the alchemist’s table.
“He was a good man,” Jerrik said. “It’s a shame this had to happen.”
“It’s going to be an even bigger shame what else is going to happen if Brenna can’t put this dark sorcery back into its bottle.”
“Brenna? What’s she got to do with this?”
Erik smirked as if he had been assigned the special task of imparting secret knowledge to the rest of them. “She’s got another prophecy on her hands. This time, it’s to cure this plague.”
Colby shook his head. “That poor girl. She just can’t catch a break, can she?”
They had barely reached the apartment building when the dark sorcery began to creep up through the cracks in the street’s pavement again. Even Erik was not immune to it as it began to burn his feet straight through the shoe and puncture its corrupt magic into the veins around his ankles.
“Hurry up,” he said as Jerrik repeatedly kept pushing the elevator door button.
When the doors opened and they went inside, a small plume of the sickened air followed them in. Erik fanned it away as much as he could as the doors closed, and they rode up to the apartment.
“I don’t understand it,” Jerrik said during their ride up the twenty-seven flights. “I thought the dark sorcery was like all other magic, that it was neither good nor bad, but simply a power that followed the direction of the one who wielded it. If no one is controlling it now that the magic has escaped from Leif, then how can it inherently be corrupt?”
“That’s just it,” Erik said as the elevator reached their apartment floor. “Someone is.”
When Lopt had reached the apartment first, with Brandt helping him to carry Matt and Brenna beside them, he had known there would be no way to prolong the news of Kemma’s death any further. He had waited until they had gotten onto the elevator before breaking the news to them, which in hindsight, was probably not a good idea. Brenna broke down into a hysterical fit of sobbing as her body collapsed beneath her, and Brandt, nearly dropping his share of carrying Matt, grabbed her in his arm to keep her from crashing to the elevator floor. Lopt took over the full brunt of supporting Matt while Brandt sat on the ground, holding Brenna in his lap as she sobbed. He cried too. Lopt talked over their tears and tried to tell them that it would be okay, that for immortals, death was never really the end; hell, it wasn’t even really the end for mortals either, with some exceptions. He promised them that he would retrieve their daughter from whichever afterlife she was in just as soon as he could find where she had gone. But, as he had thought, the devastation of hearing the news of her death was traumatic none the less.
When the doors opened up to the apartment, Leif and Helia were both sitting in the living room, both freshly cleaned and slightly rested. Helia was sitting with her legs crossed underneath her on the couch and a thick, soft cream-colored blanket draped across her waist. Leif had tended to all of her wounds, and aside from some freshly healing cuts and a handful of bruises, she was looking much stronger than before. Leif was sitting next to her with an open book that it looked like he had been reading aloud. It was a book about dark magic, which they had been searching through for anything that might help with the situation at hand. When Helia saw Matt, she tried to jump off the couch to go to him, but her legs buckled beneath her. Leif’s hand caught her arm, and he steadily helped to straighten her back up.
“Easy,” he gently warned her. “You’re still not all the way back to full strength yet.”
She nodded at him gratefully and then made another slower attempt to go to Matt. Tears filled her eyes as she gingerly walked across the apartment floor with bare feet that still had raw, blistering burns on the soles. His eyes became wet as well as he saw the condition she was in, which was a million times better than it had been several hours prior.
“What did it do to you?” she cried when she reached him and held his face with her hands. She leaned her forehead against his, and Lopt carefully let Matt go so he could stand with Helia.