When Night Breaks

by Janella Angeles

  “Both of you, shut up.” The throbbing at Kallia’s temple sharpened at their voices, tugging at her back and forth, back and forth. One, she hardly knew. Another, she knew too well. Together, it was like playing catch with a double-edged sword, both ends equally lethal.

  “Or I could find out exactly what she’s hiding now…” Jack trailed off, deep in thought all of a sudden. “Then take her memory of tonight, and be done with this.”

  Kallia’s blood went cold.

  He wouldn’t.

  Only then did Vain’s mask shatter as she began thrashing, kicking out wildly. “Don’t you fucking dare—” She clawed at his grip, slashed at his skin. “Get off me!”

  “Jack,” Kallia barked immediately, unthinking. Desperately sick to her stomach from Vain’s cries, and the truth.

  For the first time, she saw Jack as the others did. Any time he walked into a room or down the street, the people parted to escape his notice. Not for any horror he’d inflicted before, but the potential for it to come at any given moment should he snap. That unknown stood right before her: a magician with all the power and freedom to become a monster.

  Blood roaring in her ears, Kallia couldn’t unsee it. Not as Jack’s hold persisted on Vain, as he ignored the call of his name.

  Swallowing hard, she reached down for what she could. A rock, a brick, anything sharp—

  Before hitting the ground as Vain fell against her.

  Jack stood over them, his expression unreadable and thunderous beneath. The eye of a storm, keeping itself in place.

  “If I find out you’re lying, headliner,” he said hoarsely. “Next time, I won’t hesitate.”

  When he lingered, Kallia thought he might say more. She hoped to hear it, as he faltered a step back, blinking warily in her direction.

  But in just another step, he was gone. Vanished into the night.

  All so sudden, Kallia searched all around. She couldn’t trust quiet completely. Couldn’t believe he’d actually left her alone, for once.

  “Despite what he claims, I’m not lying.”

  Standing up on her own, the headliner smoothed the swoop of her bang. “I’m not here to throw you in Roth’s cage just because you don’t want to be his personal power pet.”

  “Why?” Jack’s suspicions were not unfounded, aligning with Kallia’s from this city had shown her. No one in a world like this was ever kind or merciful without reason. “Because for someone who’s a headliner, that doesn’t exactly line up.”

  “I’m allowed to have opinions.” A shrug. “Being a headliner doesn’t make me a slave to the Dealer.”

  “Everyone here sure acts like it.”

  Vain held up a hand, baring the black triangles across her knuckles. “For a gig like this, yes. People would do a little dance and lick the bottom of every shoe he owns if it made him happy.”

  “Then why are you doing this?” Kallia demanded, tired. “Any of this?”

  The tense pause went on a beat too long. “But anyone with a brain can see that the last thing we should ever do for both sides is summoning that gate. Zarose knows what fully breaking it open would do to the true side.”

  The blood rushed so forcefully to Kallia’s head, she almost swayed. The Vain who’d spoken now clashed with the Vain she recalled delighting over the opposite. “You care about the true side? What for?”

  “Do you think we all just randomly sprouted up from the ground?” Vain squared her with a puzzled look. “We were all called here from the true side to fall down the mirror. But the longer you stay, the more difficult it is to remember. The easier it becomes to not want to. I remember shit about my old life, but that doesn’t mean those people deserve any of this coming through again.”

  “What do you mean again?”

  “Any disaster that comes with that gate,” Vain said. “Why do you think Zarose made one the first time like he did? To seal volatile magic in, or keep whatever caused it from ever getting out?”

  The devils. The accusation was clear, every question a jolt to Kallia’s pulse.

  There was no logic there, either. A king that tore down his own kingdom was no king at all. Just an ordinary man, which Roth refused to be. “All Roth wanted was magic, and he got what he wanted. He wouldn’t just destroy everything he built.”

  “Not unless it came with the terms of the deal,” Vain said. “There’s a reason only certain kinds of magicians get dropped here. Anyone without magic would probably feel like they’re trying to breathe underwater. You can’t just grow gills. Someone needs to give them to you first, and that someone would demand a price.”

  Never piss off a magician who’s made deals with the devils …

  It all brought Kallia back to that talk with Roth in his study. All those warnings Jack passed on. The devils rarely ever parted with their magic, and turning a man into a magician sounded like an impossible order. But making an illusion into one as well? The price of two impossibilities could only come at the cost of so much more.

  “When the stories we’re told have been twisted so many times, we rely on intuition,” Vain said. “And the way I see it, there’s a reason why these sides have been kept separate by that gate. We’ve already seen what reaches out from the cracks alone.”

  All Kallia could think of was her magic and Demarco’s, and no doubt the other magicians scattered across Soltair whose powers turned into such an inexplicable force. She thought of the Dire Woods and its slow, conquering ruin over the land. All of the magicians who slipped into this world, disappeared without a trace in the other.

  A tide of panic coursed through her at the thought of Glorian, burning in the mirror.

  “You saw what I saw in the mirror,” Kallia whispered, brow drawn. “Is that the work of the devils, too?”

  A grim frown sealed over Vain’s lips. “Possibly. I don’t know. What’s reflected isn’t always as it seems,” she said, looking up at the sky still streaming with lights. “But if we go now, perhaps you can find out.”

  “We?”

  “We want the same thing, and you need my help for it,” Vain asserted. “And you’d be damned foolish lying to yourself and pretending you don’t need any help at all when clearly, you do.”

  With that, she strode off for the edge of the estate, taking the lead without hesitation. Kallia ran just to meet her pace, but something held her behind. A ringing in her ears that would not leave—

  Until her steps stopped entirely.

  A figure waited in the shadows a few paces past them. Faint in the dark, the sturdy set of his shoulders paired with the height was a familiar frame. One that followed and haunted, when she needed him gone most.

  No, not now. Her heart lurched as she blinked hard. Please just go.

  Or for once, be real.

  “What is it?”

  Vain’s impatient huff snapped her eyes wide open. The headliner shot a questioning glance over her shoulder, oblivious to the shadow still waiting for Kallia to pass by, to haunt her alone.

  Seeing him, any of them, it hurt too much—that pinprick of joy, with a cutting realization: it wasn’t him. It would never be him.

  Because he was in Glorian, the one burning in the mirror. And there was nothing they could do about it.

  “Even if it’s true, we can’t stop it.” Kallia’s whisper had gone cold. “Not from here.”

  Vain crossed her arms, tapping her fingers restlessly. “So you’re just going to give up without knowing? Hope everything is safe and fine over there?”

  “I’m not giving up,” Kallia fired back, that rage returning. The fact that they were on the other side meant they couldn’t leave, couldn’t warn, couldn’t reach those they saw. “But we can’t do anything from where we are. Unless you have any bright ideas, why the hell are you so—”

  The next explosion high into the night cut her off, forcing their gazes up. The fireworks showered more light, the last of them from the resounding cheers at the shape taking final form: a spectacle of gold sparks dotting
the dark into an ever-sharpening hand flashing four cards in the sky.

  “Because my real name isn’t Vain.”

  At the headliner’s words, the air went still. Silent, amid the din of celebration.

  “It’s Eva.”

  Jack needed a drink.

  As he sat on the ground, just outside the city gate, he brought the bottle to his lips. No glass this time; it wasn’t necessary. Not even for the bright-green liquor, burning down his throat in a trail of emerald fire.

  Not that it would do much. No warmth or numbness would ever arrive. At least, not at the rate that weakened most fools. A strangely disappointing discovery from the monumental first glass Jack had ever poured for himself. One he should’ve seen coming.

  All taste, but nothing behind it. All expectation, without the true experience.

  Still, it was nice to pretend. At the tables he frequented in Hellfire House, no one could tell. No one knew that on some nights, he could even pretend the act was real.

  Not tonight, with the way she’d looked at him. Both of them.

  Their eyes seared in his mind, fresh with fear.

  Jack looked up at the sky, out into the barren darkness beyond. There were no shadows of the lost wandering in that fog, and no one dared even one step outside the gate to join them. As if they might be taken like a creature snatched by a hawk in flight. Once any magician found their way to the city, they never looked back. There was nowhere else to turn.

  Which meant no chance of anyone stumbling by to bother him.

  The way the city thrummed and crackled tonight was only a precursor to the main event. Far more would come, that much was clear from the glimpses of what Jack had seen of that night. Even from those faint recollections, he knew what was coming would light all the darkness surrounding them aflame.

  I’m not risking anything in case your devil brethren decide to call you back to the fold.

  His fingers tensed over the bottleneck, stopping his next swig.

  It was as if she’d ripped it from his mind, the headliner who was all knife edges and malice. Jagged and sharp, especially toward him.

  Your strings may look cut, but maybe that’s an illusion, too.

  They could agree on one thing, at least. One factor Jack wasn’t even sure of, which could change everything if it were even a little true. If eventually strings would grow, held by the wrong hands.

  He kept a steady, wary watch on the land ahead, waiting for that pull. That lure.

  Something.

  If the strings were growing, he didn’t feel them.

  Jack stayed out there, long after the bottle was finished. Long after the lights died from the sky, when the rowdiness of the streets finally dimmed.

  He waited and listened, as he had before.

  For some sign, a voice.

  When he thought he heard a whisper, he wondered if it was real or just his imagination.

  ACT II

  Down in the world below, the magician could not escape.

  Not without mystifying the gatekeepers within.

  25

  The darkness looked like home.

  First, it was Daron’s sun-streaked greenhouse library in Tarcana. Then his messy dorm in Valmonts when he was still just a schoolboy. One of his favorite quiet bars in New Crown he’d hide away in when he wasn’t in the mood to party with the other show magicians.

  The dream pulled him here, there. Different places and different homes.

  As soon as the dirty bar floor beneath his feet shifted to clean carpet in that shade of burgundy he knew so well, he paused. The halls of the Prima Hotel stretched out before him, with his room at the very end. And one other.

  It wasn’t long before he reached his room, and turned to the door across from his. A door he’d stared at far more than his own.

  The hint of a shadow on the other side moved in the crease below. A familiar laugh sounded, and his eyes closed as though the sun had fallen over his skin. His pulse quickened and time slowed, as he reached over to—

  Daron woke up on a gasp to the hammering of metal.

  His spine jolted upright, and the blankets slid right off him. At first, there was nothing but noises. Jarring, clanging faraway noises that made his ears ring. Nothing in this room but his own shaky breaths, and the bed underneath him dampened from the sweat on his back.

  Bed?

  Daron flinched at the low whistle, accompanied by the seedlike sounds of plinking glass. Wherever he was, he wasn’t alone. The movement in the corner, the silhouette somehow familiar as he narrowed his eyes. “Eva?”

  At the croak of his voice, the lights hanging from the ceiling illuminated after a clap from the other side of the room. Not Eva.

  “Sorry to disappoint.” A snort came from the dark-skinned young man Daron had never seen who continued sweeping a bit behind him. “I’m more of a Herald, actually. But that’s neither here nor there.”

  “Herald?” Daron blinked at the remarkable colors of the stranger’s casual shirt and pants, a hue Daron wasn’t even sure he could define.

  Dizziness. It had to be the dizziness.

  “Yes, that is I. And you’re alive.” With a jaded breath of relief, Herald set his tools on the glass counter before hopping over the surface to reach the other side. “Now I can fully chastise you for nearly taking out an entire row of goods when I dragged your sorry ass in here. Don’t even get me started on the state of my poor glass coach.”

  It was as though all of Daron’s senses were returning in a slow crawl when he finally noticed his surroundings.

  Mirrors.

  So many in such tight quarters, the room was full to bursting with them. They lined every inch of the room in all shapes and sizes and frames, ranging from plain and stark to the most ornate and dazzling. Aside from the closed curtains draped in deep-violet velvet, nothing but mirrors and lights existed in sight. Like the emptiest art gallery he’d ever beheld, from the way all of the mirrors were racked against the walls like faceless portraits waiting to be purchased.

  While Daron had long since stopped flinching at the sight of a mirror, an army of them still gave him pause. “Who are you?”

  A series of soft clanking, a hiss of a curse before the smooth pour. “Just a friend of a friend of a friend’s,” came Herald’s response as he walked over with a tray of steaming cups. “I don’t often help strays who fall through the cracks, but you’re the first one the Dire Woods has ever delivered. Can’t really say no to that.”

  Daron’s pulse raced. His entire throat knotted with thorns as sensation after sensation slammed back into him, the memory of the woods. The darkness, unending as night. A living nightmare he couldn’t survive.

  Had he?

  “Where…” Daron coughed dryly, dislodging that knot. Forcing himself to breathe. “Where am I?”

  He knew even as he asked the question. Kallia’s voice slithered into his ears, a siren’s whisper.

  The true side. The place below the surface.

  Herald gave a wry response Daron didn’t hear. He pushed himself up on his elbows, bypassing the steaming cup offered to him even though his tongue felt drier than a dust-ridden floor. His knees nearly buckled when he stood, the blood rushing from his head to force him back down. By sheer determination, Daron staggered over to one of the curtained windows—careful not to crash into any more mirrors on his way, from the string of curses flung behind him—and peeled back the fabric.

  Lights.

  Flashing colors and sparks and all manner of—

  “Need I remind you, this is a place of mirrors,” Herald hissed. “If even one catches the light, they all will. And my vision is poor enough as it is.”

  The words went in one ear and out the other for Daron, even as his eyes burned from the intensity of the world below. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen, yet he’d seen it all before. He recognized those streets, bedazzled as they were. He knew the shapes of the buildings around him and the way they arched into the sky, dark as it was.
A starless midnight of a sky, while the rest of the city was afire below.

  Glorian.

  Hell, the mayor had been right.

  The curtain shut right in his face. Daron almost collapsed to the floor from the shock of darkness before he was yanked back by the elbow.

  “So smiley for a mortal.” With a shake of his head, Herald grunted as he hefted Daron’s arm over his shoulder to guide him back. “I hope that look was worth it. You’re probably going to be seeing fireworks for the next few hours.”

  Daron was too elated to care. His vision swirled as he lowered back down to the sweaty mattress, but he had never felt more alive. More awake.

  Because for once, he wasn’t dreaming. He’d made it.

  Kallia. His pulse quickened.

  “I have to go.” He moved to rise again, shaky. “I have to find—”

  “In your condition? You’re not going to find anything but your face to the ground if you try going out there as you are now.” Herald stopped him by thrusting the steaming cup into his hands. “Whatever you’re looking for can wait.”

  It couldn’t. Kallia couldn’t.

  Daron almost tossed the cup away, but wasn’t petty enough for that yet. “I don’t want to sit here and sip tea.”

  “All right, I may not brew the best tea in all worlds, but it’s still good,” Herald said defensively. “It’s safe and won’t hurt you. And better yet, it looks like you need it.”

  The temptation to throw the cup had Daron’s head throbbing so painfully, he almost growled. As soon as the room stopped spinning and Herald had his back turned, Daron would be gone. “I didn’t come all this way to wait.”

  “Why did you come here, then?” Herald sat close by with his back against the counter, taking a sip from his own mug. “Because if it took so much effort just to reach this place, then it’s really not the wisest decision to fuck it up by being sloppy. Imagine if you took the wrong turn or landed in the wrong hands…” Another long sip. “Then it would all be for nothing.”

  All for nothing.

  The worst words that could be strung together.