Chapter Twelve
“Jump! What the hell! I'm not jumping! Are you crazy?” That was the final straw; I looked down as the water rushed into a previously hidden cave and was then spit back out. I shook my head violently. “There isn’t enough tea in China to get me to jump off this cliff!” I started backing up; I was just going to have to take my chances with Julius, the evil warlock.
“That’s really a shame, Ms. Bennett. Well, for you, not for me. Now I get to have a new plaything.”
I turned and looked up the cliff to where a thin, pasty man was staring down at us. He had slicked-back black hair and a pencil-thin mustache and was wearing a dated tuxedo. He was the very picture of sleazy magician. I turned back to the man to see if he thought this was as funny as I did. He did not.
“Julius, what are you doing here?”
I turned back and took another look. So this was the evilest warlock on this side of the Barrier. At first glance, he was not impressive. He had filed his teeth down to points, uber creepy but not really scary. It was his eyes that finally did it for me. There was something wrong when you looked into them—they were missing something. Sanity.
“I’m here to make sure you both jump. I can’t have someone ruining my well-thought-out plans again, now can I?”
Well-thought-out plans? Who was this guy kidding? It was an insurance con that even the slowest college student could have come up with. Completely unimpressed.
“Be quiet, Ms. Bennett. The men are talking. Now, you two need to either jump or let’s be on our way. I have a plane on standby waiting for your decision. I have some experiments that I’ve been dying to try out for a while now. I’m not sure what use Ms. Bennett will be, but at the very least she could provide some entertainment for my men.”
The man was leering at me; who leers nowadays? Was he some reject from a silent movie? And telling me to be quiet because the men were speaking? I didn’t care who this man was supposed to be, nobody told me to be quiet so men could talk. Without thinking, I raised my hands and repeated the gesture that I had done just a few hours earlier and once again white lightning shot out of my fingers. To my surprise, it disintegrated Julius. Shocked, I was silent for a moment and then I turned around. “So does this mean we can go home? Is he dead now?”
The man was staring at me, assessing me. I was still unable to read his thoughts; whatever they were, they didn’t seem to paint me in a negative light, which was an improvement.
“That was just a construct he sent here—it wasn’t really him.”
I groaned. There was no winning today. “Is he going to send another one? Make sure we take the plunge and kill ourselves?”
“He’ll probably send something worse. Nobody has ever destroyed one of his personal constructs; I’d imagine he isn’t very happy right now.”
I looked down at the ocean below and watched the waves; it didn’t look like I had any other option. I’d met the warlock now—even though I wasn’t impressed by his appearance, the distinct lack of sanity had sent a chill down my spine and I knew that I did not want him to get his hands on me.
I looked over. “If I’m going to jump to my death, I think I should know the name of the man that’s gotten me into this mess.”
He smiled at me, the first smile he’d ever given me. He had white teeth that were slightly crooked on the bottom and his eyes crinkled at the edges. It was a smile that could inspire women the world over to do whatever he asked; it was just the push I needed to grab his hand. We both turned to face the ocean and he looked down at it, waiting for the perfect moment. He tensed his legs and the second before we jumped he said, “It’s Drake.”
This was originally published in the book Magicae Terra Episode One. The full story is currently available on Amazon.
The image was created using canva.com