“Crickets!” Celeste straightened, the closeness of the voice holding her to the spot.
A chuckle ran back up her spine, trailing behind it another chill. It was the voice from the sepulcher, the one from the urn that she carried in her bag, but she hadn’t expected to encounter it so soon and with Geezer’s words still in her mind, telling her that the jar was crafted to hold a great evil. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” it said into her ear.
False protest fluttered in her throat along with her thrashing heart, but words did not find their way out of her mouth.
“What are you up to, wandering the streets in the dark and plucking out the lights? Trying to impress me?”
“I think…I’m looking for you,” she finally managed to say.
“Of course you are.” A touch brushed over her shoulders, and the voice left one of her ears for the other. “And playing with arcana, I see.” The noxscura she’d set around the globe swirled faster, light breaking through for a moment, and in it she saw a hand extending from over her shoulder, the fingers long and clawed. It didn’t have a hand before, she thought, it didn’t have shape at all. But now…
“Did you destroy the other ones?” she asked, staring hard at where the hand had been even after the noxscura was allowed to fall back into place and plunge them into darkness once again.
“Contrary to what some may think, I’m not really interested in destruction. I only took what already belonged to me once upon a time, and I have nothing but pure intentions for the arcana I’ve gathered.”
Celeste’s fingers hovered over her locket, her other hand at the flap to her satchel. Together, perhaps, she could use noxscura and the urn to pull whatever this thing was back in. But she had to be sure because she couldn’t allow herself to imprison another being unjustly. “What do you mean?”
“All of this,”—a shadow flickered beside her—“this town and this magic, it was mine once. I foolishly shared my gifts, and then my own power was turned against me.”
“That sounds…unkind.”
“It was,” he hissed in her ear. “And now I am owed it back.”
That too sounded unkind.
“Delphine wasn’t the one who trapped you, was she? Did you lie to me about that?”
“I never said she did, only that she kept me like a prize, like a thing that belonged to her.” In the silence of the calming breath he took after his biting words, Celeste felt the caress of something like a hand on her shoulder. “Tell me, to whom do you belong?”
Once, she would have said her sister too, and before that, the Osurehm priests, but now? It was much too frightening to think about, let alone to say, that she was on her own. The presence at her back closed in, and she stiffened. She was meant to be asking the questions, not him. “What are you called?”
More rumbling laughter rolled up her spine. “Oh, now,thatis a good answer, pet.”
Celeste’s face reddened in the dark, and her throat tightened around the words that would clarify that wasn’t what she meant.
“You may call me the name I was given: Syphon.”
“Syphon,” she repeated. So, he had a name, and he had shared it which meant it was either a lie, or it had no power. Somehow, both options gave her the courage to turn around.
There was a form there, but it wasn’t complete. If she’d reached out, her hand would have gone right through him.
“I think we have a few things to sort out, Syphon,” she said, hating how meek her words were as she flipped open her satchel. “It might be a good idea if you get back inside the jar, and then we can talk.”
The form didn’t have a face, but there was an expression in the darkness about its head, something she was so familiar with, she could identify it without features: disappointment. “You don’t want me to do that,” it said, shadows shifting where its mouth would be as it spoke. “I can offer you so much more outside of that prison than I ever could trapped within. You do want more, don’t you?”
Celeste swallowed, heartbeat speeding up.
The form came closer, and shadowy arcana shifted around her, but it was not like noxscura. It was, instead, the faint trace of magic, the potential of a spell, the remnants of arcana gone past. It prodded at her, reading her, and she should have stopped it, but she was too terrified to move. “No, not more, not like that sister of yours. You want…somethingdifferent.” Syphon’s voice was in her ear again, and her scant vision darkened further.
“I don’t want to be like this,” she admitted, the words escaping without her permission.
The entity chuckled again. “I would say I’m offended, our powers being so deliciously similar, but I could show you what you really need, and then I could give you everything.”
What Celeste needed at that moment was to see him. She stroked her thumb over her locket, calling back the noxscura from the arcane globe over her head. The light inside was revealed, and it fell on the shadow. For a too brief moment, there was the ghost of someone tall and masculine, but light always doused shadows, and the form was just as quickly burnt away.
The pull in Celeste’s chest surprised her—he was gone, and she hadn’t wanted that—and then there was a crash.
Celeste cried out, sharpness digging into her arm. She cowered away from the shattering globe as a second and third lamppost burst along West Road, dousing her in a deeper darkness. She clamped a hand over her arm but pulled it away just as quickly as a second shock of pain bit into her fingers. Staggering through the circle, she went toward the only light left, the tavern’s torch. Arm illuminated, blood ran from where slivers of glass had embedded themselves in her bicep.
