CoS02

## Chapter 2

**Chapter 2** of **City of Spells** follows **Zekia**.

## **Full Version**

ZEKIA HAD A GUN.

She’d never had one before and she wasn’t even sure if she’d use it. She didn’t like how large it looked in her small hands, or how heavy it felt for something that held only six bullets. Six lives that could be ruined. Zekia’s hands were far smaller and could ruin far more than that.

Still, she had a gun.

It was best to have a gun when Wesley Thornton Walcott was conscious. Zekia had learned that the hard way.

The former underboss of Creije was handcuffed beside her, at the head of their army, eyes like charcoal as he stared into the bloody wreck of the district. The handcuffs were as unnecessary as Zekia’s gun, because everyone—even the people they were about to kill, who should have been too busy to notice—knew that Wesley could slip them in a moment.

The best the cuffs could do was slow him down, but if slowing Wesley down was an option, then Zekia would take it. He had fast hands and kept using them to try to kill members of their army. Though in fairness, Zekia had been using hers to do a lot worse, but his anger was never directed at her.

Of all the people he’d tried to kill, she was never one of them.

Maybe he was starting to understand that they were supposed to be by the Kingpin’s side together, as family.

Wesley was bruised but not broken, and he watched with unblinking eyes as they tore through Creije, a piece at a time. This was the first district they would take from the capital and it wouldn’t be the last.

One down, six to go.

It was dark out, and the once affluent High Town was now littered with soldiers, ash from the burnt-down houses of Creije’s wealthy elite smoldering behind them. Zekia could see the busker dormitories from here, where Wesley had made his name. The windows stretched in high arches, colored glass like rainbows across the building so that it almost looked like a place of worship. She imagined him growing up there, practicing tricks while the moon watched patiently above.

She liked this part of Creije, which mixed people rich in gold with orphans like Wesley who did what they could to survive. Two sides of the world, so close to each other. Living in perfect contrast, like the array of colors on the dormitory windows.

“You won’t kill me,” the man in front of her said.

Zekia looked down at him.

They had captured him all too easily a few hours ago, not long after they’d stepped off the floating railways and into High Town. There had been a lot of blood since then and a lot of screaming that Zekia hoped quickly to forget. But the moment they’d approached the district barricade and thrown this man to the ground, there had been an impasse.

He was on his knees and looking at Zekia’s new gun with a narrow glare. She didn’t know why—the gun wasn’t originally meant for him. Still, he glared, and the way his fellow soldiers paused and held their breath made Zekia wonder just how important his life was in all of this.

Was he a general?

Did he command them while Doyen Fenna Schulze ran and gave orders from the safety of her hideout in Yejlath?

“Killing you doesn’t matter,” Zekia said.”The future is what matters, and I’m going to fix it.”

The man spat on the ground by her feet. “You won’t win. *Frjl* will always prevail.”

The idea of freedom seemed funny to Zekia now. It was a dangerous thing to have and to be. Were these soldiers free as they followed orders to risk their lives and go against Dante Ashwood? Was Zekia free, trying to save the realms from a vision that had almost killed her?

If you knew the consequences of something, were you ever really free to choose what your heart desired?

“Creije will never fall.”

“You’re wrong,” Zekia said.

Conquering Creije would be hard, but not impossible, and once it fell, the other cities wouldn’t be far away. They looked to their capital as a beacon, following its example or trying to measure up to what it stood for.

If they took Creije, the rest of the Uskhanyan realm would come easy. Zekia was sure.

Almost.

As an Intuitcrafter, she should have had foresight, but now there were always far too many visions screaming in her head to make sense of. Too many futures that could come true and too many paths people could take. These days, guessing was the most accurate thing she could do.

She’d tried to focus and make sense of all the possibilities once, but she’d lost herself somewhere along the way, and now pasts and futures and their in-betweens swam through her veins like hungry fish.

It didn’t matter, though. Ashwood had shown her the only future that mattered.

He’d shown her how to fix everything.

Zekia raised the gun to the man’s head.

She’d never shot someone before. She’d never needed to.

She wondered if it would feel different to destroy a person without magic.

She heard the shuffle as the soldiers behind the barricade gritted their teeth and adjusted their weapons. She was standing in the center, between her army and theirs, and if she killed this man, they’d fire their guns and her Crafters would fire their magic.

More of the dead screaming through her mind.

Zekia closed her eyes. Her finger squeezed against the trigger and—

“Don’t.”

Wesley was a shadow over her.

“Kid,” he said, placing his cuffed hand on top of hers. “Don’t.”

Zekia looked up at Wesley.

He was a little skinnier than when they’d first taken him, with hollowed cheeks and a chin she pictured cutting her finger on. He was also very tall, especially when Zekia was standing side by side with him like this. Then again, Wesley was also a good few years older than her and Zekia suspected that when she got to be his age, she’d be just as big.

Wesley still wore a suit, but it was stained with his blood. And his eyes, stamped purple as the sleeplessness mixed into bruising, held pupils that were nothing but large black circles stealing all the color from him.

He had been stubborn and he had been punished for it, because sometimes hurting people was the only way to save them. Dante Ashwood had taught her that lesson well. And once she finally got Wesley to give in, he would be so proud of her strength.

When she finally got Wesley to give in, everything would be okay.

They would be a family.

Zekia just had to try a little harder.

“Will you join us if I let him go?” Zekia asked Wesley. “Will you join us now that Creije is on the line?”

In an ideal world, Wesley would have said yes.

He would have taken her hand and said he’d be her big brother.

He would have told Zekia that he liked the view from his high horse very much, but that he liked the view from a throne a lot more.

Instead, Wesley lifted his hand from hers and said, “I wouldn’t join you if my life was on the line.”

“Don’t you think it is already?”

Wesley laughed and Zekia didn’t mind, even if it was the bitter, horrible kind of laugh that was meant to make her feel like killing him, just so she wouldn’t be able to use him.

She liked it when Wesley laughed. She liked seeing him happy. She thought it was good that she made him smile every now and again, because the rest of the time all she did was make him scream.

“I’m not afraid of you, kid,” Wesley said. “If you were going to kill me, then you would have done it already. And Creije isn’t on the line. One district won’t break my city. I built it to be strong and when this is all over, it’ll still be standing.”

Zekia could see why people found Wesley frightening. Even now, when he was hungry and cold and looking like he was about ready to fall over, he still looked formidable. He still looked like an underboss.

“The city may be standing, but the people will be on their knees.”

It was Dante Ashwood who spoke then, and Zekia couldn’t help but think how his voice sounded like a whisper in the wind and a storm in the dead of night all the same.

Dante Ashwood, Kingpin of Uskhanya and future Doyen of the realm, had shadows swarming him like fireflies to offer a shield of protection. Zekia thought they smelled like dark, burnt magic, as if Ashwood had seared their power to him, and sometimes she held her breath when they neared, just in case they tried to burn her from the inside out, stealing the parts of her mind that had not yet gone.

Zekia took one of Wesley’s cuffed hands in her own.

His fingers were cold and limp, and he stared blankly ahead as if she hadn’t touched him at all. When Zekia squeezed his hand, his jaw ticked.

Wesley looked like he was trying very hard not to kill her.

The moon acted as a torch as they eyed the barricade.

The fort was erected by the amityguards, with guns and charms holding their positions steady. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, but Zekia wasn’t worried. Her army had what these soldiers never could: vision. The hope of a new realm, ruled by magic, with Crafters ready for a glorious future, filled with peace and light and no more pain.

They just had to kill a few people first.

But it was worth it. Ashwood had told her so.

*Sometimes you have to hurt people to save them.*

Ashwood approached the man on the ground and placed his large hands around the prisoner’s head.

“Surrender,” Ashwood said.

From behind the barricade, a voice cracked through a speaker. “We don’t take orders from crooks.”

Wesley snorted. Zekia squeezed his hand tighter.

*Just surrender*, she thought. *If you surrender, then I won’t have to do anything bad.*

“Nobody needs to die today,” Ashwood said.

“You sure as fire-gates do,” the voice shot back.

Ashwood sighed, and in a last attempt to stay the bloodshed, he said, “Lay down your weapons and join me. Or keep them and die.”

There was a pause.

Utter and complete silence.

The capital city of Uskhanya was alive every second, from dawn to dusk before the cycle started over, and usually a scream could barely be heard above the bastardized magic and laughter of criminals. But now Zekia could hear the birds crying out in warning and, if someone had a pin, she’d probably hear that drop too.

The speaker crackled again.

The man on the other end took a breath.

“*Djefil*,” he said. “Go fuck yourself.”

Ashwood sighed. He turned to Zekia. She caught a glimpse of that ghost smile somewhere in his face, and swallowed.

“We can save you.”

Zekia said it quietly, almost a whisper, but then Ashwood twisted his hand around their prisoner’s neck and Zekia felt the snap shoot through her.

There was a wave of anger from the amityguards and in mere seconds bullets spat out from behind the barricade. They stopped inches from Zekia’s face, hitting the shield her Crafters conjured. Crashing against the force field, they sounded like raindrops on a tin roof.

Zekia turned to Wesley, whose hand was still limp in hers. He stared ahead, barely blinking his black eyes as the shots continued.

When he swallowed, Zekia heard it over the gunfire.

Wesley knew what was coming.

He knew the future without needing mind magic.

He knew what Dante Ashwood was going to say, because he knew the man just as well as Zekia did, and he knew what it took to achieve greatness. The sacrifices that needed to be made for a better future.

“Kill them all,” Ashwood said.

And so they did.

One district down. Six more to go.