Page 81 of A Spot of Tea and Sorcery: Vol. 6

And Luna felt the shudder ripple through Garden as tremendous surges of power were drawn from its grounds and sent hurtling through dimensions. The very sky overhead seemed to groan with pain.

Garden!Luna cried out with her heart.Garden, fight them! Don’t let them do this to you!

From the corner of her eye, she saw a mound of thorny canes, green leaves, and pink-and-yellow blossoms gather, seeking to rush the sorcerer circle. She saw bright orange faces, snarling viciously, and little puffs of snapdragon flame. The flowers of Garden rushed to defend their home.

But there were other sorcerers, not just those forming the circle. Others standing guard, who were swift to convert all the great energy around them, creating Dire-bolts, with which they blasted anything that moved. Luna, from where she was bound, could not see what became of the flowers. All she knew was that the circle of chanting figures around her remained unbroken, and the Dark magic in the atmosphere swelled unimpeded.

She closed her eyes, willing Garden and all its inhabitants to hear her desperate mind.Don’t die for me, little friends,she begged silently.Save yourselves, please!

But they couldn’t. Their lives were all bound up in Garden’s great life. And the spell even now mounting and growing in a great ball of energy around Alfred P. Grimm’s gravestone would drain every drop of Garden’s lifeforce.

The sorcerers surrounding her lifted their arms. Each voice chanted a unique thread of spell, blending together in an evil, multi-stranded chorus. Luna could feel the greenness of Garden draining, could feel the lovely lawns and blossoms vanishingin puffs of dust and decay. There was no escape. Not for the flowers. Not for Garden. Not for herself.

She tried to pray. But she couldn’t. The chanting was too loud in her ears.

Instead, she tried to picture Nigel. Tried to see again the look on his face when he kissed her on the doorstep of The Arcane Bouquet. When he drew back and told her in a rush of abject passion,“I love you! Luna, my dearest, you are my very heart and soul!”

She tried to see the moment when he sat beside her on her childhood bed, kissing her cheek so tenderly as he murmured,“Please, marry me.”

She tried to see him, standing in her aunties’ garden, as he slipped a simple gold band on her finger and said:“I vow to make a home with you, to tend your gardens, to brew your teas, to carry your burdens when they are heavy, and to remind you every day how fiercely you are loved.”

But none of these moments would clarify for her. Instead, the only image she could find with any clarity was the first one: the moment when he lay stunned on the shop floor, a pool of rain water spreading beneath him, gazing up at her in utter shock. She’d pulled her head back, her nose unexpectedly filled with the delicious scent of sandalwood and cinnamon, and found those sad blue eyes of his blazing into hers.

She’d not recognized the emotion burning in them. Not then.

Now it seemed so obvious.

“Nigel,” she whispered, her lips moving softly, her voice lost in the chanting power of the spell. “My Nigel.”

Your Nigel?

The voice erupted from somewhere deep and dark and echoing.

A stirring moved through the aether, rippling through sigils and power-transferences. A terrible pressure of energy, whichconverged suddenly in the middle of Luna’s chest. She screamed with pain as a roiling portal to the Void opened directly inside her.

Your Nigel?that voice spoke again, nearer and closer and darker. Rising up through the Void, through her being, seeping into her blood and bones.I think not, my dear little cousin. No, for you will find that he is MINE. And I am coming for him now. And I will make him bleed, and I will make him pay. I will make them all pay!

Lunatic laughter filled Luna’s head as branching fingers of spirit and awareness ripped through her soul like a spreading virus.

The atmosphere seethed with despair.

Nigel gasped as he stepped through the doorway, his bare feet skidding to a halt, not on lush green grass, but on dust. Dry, dead dust. Everywhere he cast his gaze, he saw terrible patches of spreading grayness, signs of life being actively drained.

The resurrection spell had already begun.

The aunties crowded close behind him. Through the thud of his pulse, he heard their voices exclaiming, “Oh my!” and “Goddess preserve us!” Despite all their confident declarations, despite all their scried visions, they were nonetheless shocked by what they saw before them. Anyone would be.

Fabian appeared on Nigel’s right, his face very hard. “I know,” he said. “It’s bad.”

It was more than bad. It was devastating. All that work, all that passion, poured out over the last two years of Nigel’s life via his sweat and blood and tears. All that beauty which had, despite the most impossible odds, sprung back into glorious abundance. Now drained away like a blood-letting. Fed to the Dire in exchange for raw power.

Lifting his arm, Fabian indicated a place where roiling anti-light and strange colors erupted in the sky. “That’s where it’s happening,” he said.

As though Nigel needed him to point it out. He almost turned and punched his brother again for his stupidity. But he didn’t.

Instead, he forced himself to study the array of sigils, floating in the sky, circling slowly in strange rotation as they channeled power and magic and more power and more magic. He’d never fully learned Jastira’s Great Spell. In fact, he’d only looked at it the one time—that terrible day, when he’d entered her chambers without permission, determined to discover the truth behind his suspicions, which had become too impossible to ignore. He saw the written theory of the spell, recognized what it was intended for, recognized . . . far too many things. Most of which he wished he hadn’t.

This was Dark Magic indeed. Not Infernus Magic, but, in his opinion, equally worthy of damnation.