ghoul magic
The spell broke over Regulus’s head like an egg. The heavy bloom of magic across his eyes dissipated, lessened. Peter wailed for all he was worth, curling in on himself. His body wasn’t acting right, his muscles spasming and seizing as ink leached from the cut in his face.
Ink, not blood.
Because ghouls don’t bleed.
Regulus scrambled back from Peter’s shuddering form.
“Barty!” Dorcas cried with relief, yanking on the sword that held her down to the deck.
“Barty, where have you been?” Regulus said, his voice thick and scratchy.
Barty didn’t turn his head, didn’t give any indication he had heard either of them. Regulus repeated himself.
Stillness.
“Barty, can you hear me?”
Scary stillness.
“Barty!” Regulus barked at him.
Stillness. Still as the dead, almost…
Dorcas ran her mouth, “Thank the gods Barty, you found us. Come and help me with this damn thing. I was beginning to think that-”
“I’m not going to help you, Dorcas.”
Barty’s tone, heavy and rumbling and so very dead, cast itself over Dorcas like a woolen net. Regulus watched in horror as her eyes glassed over and her mouth dropped.
His tone, near twin to Peter’s.
Barty tossed his hair out of his face, ran his tongue viciously across his teeth. His boots slapped at the wet deck.
“Why would I help you? You’re not my friend.”
“Barty, stop!” Regulus shouted, but it seemed the spell had already locked in place.
“Regulus doesn’t care for you. Nor does Pandora. Nor does Evan. Nor does your sister Elizabeth. She left you for a reason, Dorcas,” Barty lumbered towards Dorcas, who was frozen in her place.
“Stop it! Shut up!” Regulus said, but his pleas fell deaf. He tried to pull himself up, slipping on the deck, weak with vertigo.
“You’re loud. You’re bold. You’re crass. You think if you hold yourself up as the strong one, the clever one, you’ll actually belong somewhere. You’ll be indispensable.”
Barty tipped his head up to the sky, letting the rain wash over him. A puppet on strings, Dorcas unconsciously copied the motion.
“You don’t belong anywhere at all. Not with your friends. Not with your family. Not on this boat. So get up,” Barty ordered.
Sharply, Dorcas did so. Her bloomers tore on the sword, but she effortlessly wrapped her hand around the hilt and yanked it from the wood. She tossed it aside, swaying on her feet.
Barty smiled, small and cruel.
“And walk off the edge of the ship.”
Dorcas turned and marched.
“No!” Regulus screamed hopelessly. He had to break Dorcas from the spell, sever the connection, the way Barty had done to Peter. His words wouldn’t work. That much was clear.
Sever the connection. The ocean repelled magic, Remus had said. That’s why it required a physical toll to stick. Sever the spell. Cut the connection.
Physically, he had to cut the connection.
He threw his body forward and jumped at Barty, throwing them both to the ground, hitting the deck hard enough to bruise. Regulus straddled Barty, locking his knees on either side of his friend’s hips, smacking his hands at Barty’s flailing grasp.
“Don’t make me do this!” Regulus shouted, “I’m not going to hurt you!”
Barty said nothing, growling. Regulus could feel the magic radiating off of him, reaching the spell’s hands towards Dorcas’s receding figure.
She was getting close to the rails. Too close.
Regulus managed to pin Barty’s hands. His friend bucked beneath him, scratching and throwing his weight around like a wild animal.
“Knock it off Barty,” Regulus slammed his Barty’s wrists against the deck, “Stop it! Let her go!”
Barty landed a kick, flipping Regulus off and over him. He scrambled to get the high ground, to get on top of Regulus, his wet hair slapping against his face. Barty began to cackle, a high, trilling, utterly inhuman sound.
Dorcas put his hands on the rail. Then hiked her feet up.
It wasn’t working. Sever the magic, cut the spell…
Sever the connection.
Cut the wielder.
“I’m sorry,” Regulus said and clawed at Barty’s face.
Barty leaped off of him with a cry of pain, Regulus used the time to grab his fallen sword and bring the butt of the weapon down on Barty’s head. The blow landed solid and even. Barty’s head cracked and he collapsed with a thud onto the planks.
Across the foremast deck, Dorcas stood tall and stiff on the railing, her arms flat to her thighs. She gasped as the spell broke and gravity pitched her body forward into the ocean before she could stop it.
Sever.
Step.
Regulus’s hand closed around Dorcas’s ankle.
Sever.
Falling.
He pulled back and reached out to bear her weight as she fell, this time, towards him.
Dorcas was gasping with tears, reeling from the power of the spell. Regulus just held her, pressing his fingers against her head, her neck, checking for damage, rocking back and forth; as dependable as the tide. Dorcas began to babble.
“He just…he just started, started talking and I…I- everything went white and sick- I didn’t, I couldn’t help it…” Dorcas said incoherently. Regulus brushed her braids back from her face, murmuring softly.
“It’s okay” he said, “It’s alright now. He’s…” Regulus could’t find the words. Dorcas finished for him.
“A ghoul,” she said, voice cracking, “Barty’s a ghoul. That man, he did the same thing to you and he’s a-”
“A ghoul,” Regulus repeated. Barty’s body had begun to jerk around on its own, like Peter’s, ticking and shivering uncontrollably. Black leaked down his neck from the wound in his head, turning his hair dark and matted.
Black. Ink, not blood.
Because ghouls don’t bleed.
Meaning Barty was already dead. Peter too. Dead, but resurrected, made into ghouls for Malfoy’s crew. Tears for his friend, hot and defiant, streaked down Regulus’s face.
Dorcas hiccuped, “What do we…what do we do with him?”
Regulus cast a forlorn glance between the bars of the rails, out into the frothing grey sea. Dorcas followed his gaze. The suggestion did not need to be aired for all to understand.
“No,” she protested, “I won’t do that to him.”
“He’s not alive, Dorcas,” Regulus said softly.
“He’s not dead either.”
“He is. ”
“Not entirely.” Dorcas shook her head, her teeth chattering with the cold, “There’s got to be a way to get him back to us.”
“There’s not,” Regulus insisted, “You saw what Peter did to me. Barty did the same thing to you. Ghoul magic.”
“He can still be healed.”
“They’re in too deep, Dorcas. It’s one thing to be commanded, it’s another to be able to perform magic of their own. Malfoy’s turned them into vessels. They’re just shells.”
Regulus’s head began to throb; a suffocating pain behind his eyes that grew more unbearable with the icy storm raking across his face. He no longer trusted himself to understand what was going on.
“We need to find Remus,” he mumbled, more to distract himself, “He’ll know what this all means. About the ghouls. About Barty.”
“He’s our friend.” Dorcas cried, her tender heart giving way to the cold logic of the situation, “He tried to save us…he. Hesaved us.”
Regulus’s roaming eyes found Barty’s where he lay on the deck. His friend’s gaze was empty, skinned of all memory and humanity. Ink began to leak from the corners of Barty’s fluttering eyes; dark, evil rivers that carved through the pale skin of his face. Evan’s knife was clutched in his hand still, his fingers reflexively tightening and loosening around the hilt as his body trembled.
Regulus was watching his friend die a hundred times over.
He held Dorcas tighter.
“He’s gone, Dorcas.”
But even he didn’t believe himself.