by D. N. Hoxa
Some others were pretty easy to guess. A weresnake will have scales on his skin, blinking in and out of existence every few minutes, and if you looked hard enough, especially under the jaws and ears or in between their fingers, they were really hard to miss. Vampires could pass for a human easier, until their teeth grew really sharp and they wanted to drink your blood. By that point, you’d be running for your life if you were human. If not, you’d stay and fight because all vampires were weaker than baby ogres.
Mages and elemental spirits, on the other hand, were very hard to make out. They looked very ordinary—no scales, no white skin, no sharp teeth. Still, they had a kind of aura around them, and if you were in their presence for just a few minutes, you could tell that there was something different about them.
But this guy didn’t look or feel like anything. Human, mage, an elemental spirit—take your pick. And I was not about to take him to my apartment where he could kill me in ways I’d only imagined at night under the safety of my blanket.
“Let me tell you your options,” I said. “In three seconds, you either start talking or you walk away.” A pretty generous offer if you asked me.
One, two, three.
Marcus just watched me, his lips parted, his colorless eyes wide in surprise.
So he wasn’t going to talk. With my chakri still in hand, I turned around to head upstairs, figuring I could get the other from the wall when this guy was gone. Would it be too much to ask for him to just leave so I could get some shut-eye and be gone in the morning? There was literally nothing he could say that would pique my interest or make me want to let him into my apartment.
“Nana sends her regards.”
Except that.
I stopped walking again. My eyes squeezed shut and a sigh left my lips. It had been so long since I’d heard that name spoken out loud. Every hair on my body stood at attention as my mind struggled to come to a decision even though I already knew I’d lost the battle.
“Follow me.”
2
My apartment was very modest. It came furnished when I rented it, and I only bought a couple of things that I needed—like the coffee machine. The living room was spacious, and I even had a fireplace, too, made of yellow and grey rocks. I had been eager for winter so I could light up a fire and watch it all night or until I got bored, but now I was never going to get to do it, and it pissed me off.
Marcus sat at the end of the indigo sofa, both his hands on the armrest as if he was trying to keep from falling, though he was sitting. I didn’t like the look in his eyes—he looked afraid but also like he was hiding something.
I played with the chakris around my wrists and watched him, hoping he’d start talking already before I ran out of luck and fell asleep.
“How did you find me?” I asked. He knew my name, and I hadn’t told my real name to anyone in the past four years. It made me very curious.
“I looked,” he said. Such a smartass. “I’ve been looking for you for a while now. Nana sent me to give you a message.”
There it was again, that name.
Nana. Tanana Kaur, one of the most powerful magians the world had ever seen, the creator of Sweet water, a blend of holy water served in a cup engraved with two different spells in Futhark runes that worked together perfectly to create the most powerful sleep inducer known to mankind. And it was called Sweet because of the dreams it induced. People who’d tried it said it was better than any drug out there, and of course, it was forbidden without a prescription, and very few bastards were lucky enough to get it.
She was also the creator of a very complicated blend of two spells that were able to alter your perception of reality, as well as make you able to manipulate the things you see as if they were real. I couldn’t quite understand how that would be beneficial to anyone, but Nana claimed too many people would rather live in a made-up place than the real world. She could use spells like it was nobody’s business, often times not needing to even speak the runes to manipulate magic, and the power she put behind them was incredible. The guy who took my eye and almost killed me was nothing compared to what she could do.
Also, she was the woman who raised me.
“So give it,” I said, my voice ice-cold. In my head, an imaginary door had opened wide. Memories rushed out to the center of my mind, taking my breath away. The face of a middle-aged woman with white hair, dark skin, and green eyes filled my vision. Her smile, her scowl, her disappointment—they were all so vivid, you’d think I was staring at her face for real.
“She said to tell you to find your father,” Marcus said, swallowing loudly.
I leaned back in my recliner and looked down at my chakris. Their edges were so sharp they mesmerized you and almost made you want to run your finger over them. A very bad idea—just like Marcus’s. He’d come here to play games with me, and it wasn’t going to end well. Did I want to kill him instantly, or hold him until he told me who really sent him? If so, I was going to have to get my whip, too.
“She’s gone, Ruby,” Marcus whispered, and I looked at him again. Having only one eye wasn’t so bad. I’d had time to get used to it—three long years. It was only a matter of shifting your focus the right way. The worst part were the headaches that came from tiring my good eye too much during a day, but, at least I was alive.
“Where did she go?” It was impossible to keep from asking. I wanted to know exactly how deep this game ran.
“She was taken, I think.” He looked down at his hands, clutching the sofa’s armrest. “I don’t know—there was no body.”
A voice whispered in my ear. What if he’s telling the truth? I could have laughed at the stupid voice.
“Do you know who Nana is, Marcus?” I asked. If he was going to lie to me, the least he could do was come prepared.
Surprised, he looked up, his eyes stuck to my patch. I hated when people did that, even though I knew it couldn’t be helped.
“I’ve been with her for a year now,” he said. “She found me in the streets.”
Now that I could believe. Nana had found me the same way, except at the time I’d been seven years old.
“A year is a long time. Being with her, you’d have seen.”
He nodded. “I have.”
“And you would have known.”
He arched a brow. “Known what?”
“You would have known that nobody just takes Nana.”
You couldn’t even sneak up on her. I’d tried, many times as a kid and an adult, but she always knew, no matter how silent you were. She always knew when you were in the room or even outside the door.
“Somebody did because she’s gone and the Enclave is empty,” Marcus said through gritted teeth. He was getting pissed off, too.
“The Enclave is never empty.” It was full of people Nana deemed worthy of taking under her wing, to help, to fuck up—whatever the reason. Just a bunch of misfits who would have died long ago if it wasn’t for the protection she offered.
“You’re right, it’s not,” he said with a cold smile. “It’s filled with two dead bodies of kids under fifteen.”
A shiver washed down my back. “You lie.”
He dragged himself closer to the edge of the sofa and smiled like a man ready to lose his damn mind.
“I was out running errands a week ago, and when I came back to the Enclave, everything was broken, there were bodies in the hallway, and strangers were there, too. I didn’t see them, but I heard them before Nana grabbed me, told me to come look for you, and pushed me out.”
His voice shook, and there was something about the look in his wide eyes…
No. He was a liar.
“So how do you know she’s not there?”
“Because I went back. I went back and searched the entire place three times, and I’m telling you, she’s gone. She never leaves the Enclave, but she’s not in it.” He shrugged. “I didn’t even know where to look.”
He was right—Nana never left the Enclave. It’s why she kept a group of peo
ple around at all times—to do the things that needed going out for.
“Do you know that I was with her for fifteen years?” I asked him, but he shook his head. “Well, I was, and I can tell you that even if somebody somehow made it past her Guard, she’d have killed them before they could blink.” I knew Nana. I knew how she moved, how she looked, what she thought. She was strong, stronger than anyone I’d ever met. She was able to blend spells together better than anyone I’d ever seen. She once told me that Futhark spoke to her and that she could hear it in a way that made sense to nobody else she knew. I believed her because I’d seen it happen with my own eyes. I’d seen her pick up a piece of paper and a pen and write down Futhark runes like they belonged to her, like she knew exactly which spell worked with which without even having to open a spell book. It was a very complicated skill to be able to recognize which spell connected well with which and to be able to mold them into one. A lot of people had died by pairing the wrong spells; that usually end up in disastrous explosions of magic. That’s why she was a high priestess, a title reserved only for the most powerful of mages.
Being a mage meant you had access to the magic that filled the world with life and supplied it with the energy it required to keep on going. Different mages had an affinity to different kinds of very specific magic. Like me, for example. I was a light mage, able to tap into electricity, which was just a shape of magic that humans had learned how to shape and contain for their use. There were telepaths, healers, destructive mages, illusionists—the list went on and on. But none of these powers were as strong as spells. The magic doubled, even tripled when guided by spells. The energy was always there, but learning how to channel it was something else entirely. The best way to do it was through spells written in Futhark runes—the oldest runic alphabet in the world, said to have been created specifically to give shape to magic sometime around the first century. The runes held power, and the spell books passed on from generation to generation showed you exactly how to do all of them, but not all mages could make them work. Most, like me, were stuck using the only magic that spoke to them. I always sucked ass when trying to conjure spells. The runes felt strange to me, weird, unreachable, and in turn, they never allowed me to mold my magic into different shapes. That’s why mages like high priests and priestesses were so powerful, and why it was damn near impossible to just waltz into the home of someone like Nana and take them.
Marcus brought his hands in front of his face and sighed into them. “I don’t know how it happened or why. I’m just here to give you her message.”
“To find my father?”
“Yes, to find your father,” he repeated.
I smiled because I wasn’t going to let this asshole get into my head. He could tell me his stories all day if he wanted to, but I wasn’t going to believe him.
A second ticked by and I almost heard a pointer turn in my head.
Closing my eyes, I exhaled loudly and reached for my phone in my pocket. When I left Nana four years ago, I told her that I was never going back. I was no good to the people around me, and she’d already done all she could for me. She’d wanted to fix me ever since I stepped foot in her Enclave, but I guess some people just aren’t fixable.
Still, I’d had her phone number memorized for a long time now, and my fingers hadn’t forgotten it. She kept a landline because she refused to give away the old. “It’s what makes us who we are. Our past is as important as our future,” she used to say. Now I was glad she felt that way because I had a way of confirming that what Marcus said was bullshit, and I could kill him right where he sat and be done with it. It was one in the morning, I was tired, and I needed to leave Nashville by dawn.
I put the phone to my ear and looked at Marcus. My eye analyzed every inch of him, but there was nothing I found to tell me that he was as full of shit as I thought he was. He waited, looking down at my red and brown carpet, his fingers tapping against one another in impatience.
A woman suddenly spoke in my ear.
“You have reached a number that is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check your number and try again.”
My heart fell all the way to my heels. I deleted the number and typed it again, this time making sure that I had it all right.
I put the phone to my ear again and held my breath.
“You have reached a number—” I put the phone away and held on to it tightly, for fear I’d throw it at Marcus’s head.
Don’t panic, I urged myself. There was an explanation to this. Maybe Nana forgot to pay the bill. Maybe she just got tired of the landline ringing and decided to get a cell phone instead.
Maybe fish can fly.
I jumped to my feet, my hands shaking slightly. Dark spots filled my vision, and my mind raced with too many thoughts at once.
“Tell me what she said again. Word for word,” I said to Marcus, trying hard to keep my voice from rising. I tended to shout a lot when I lost it.
“She said, find Ruby Monroe and tell her to find her father. Don’t come back here before you do. Now, run.” Marcus said. “Then she pushed me out the door and slammed it in my face.”
“And you let her?”
“She gave me no choice. The Guard pushed me out,” he said. That I could believe. Nana’s Guards were stronger than most. If she set one up to protect a place, it took a lot of magic to break through it, and I was guessing Marcus didn’t have much to even try with.
“If you’re lying to me, Marcus—” I started, but he cut me off.
“I’m not lying to you. I know who you are, I’m not stupid.” He could have fooled me. He stood up. “I did what she asked me to do. I found you and I gave you the message. It’s up to you to decide what you’re going to do now.” He strode to the door with his hands clenched in fists.
“Where are you going?” I heard myself ask.
“I’m going back to Richmond in case she returns.”
He opened the door and slammed it shut behind him while I watched, unable to move a single muscle.
The living room kept spinning while I took a second to come to terms with what had just happened.
Nana was taken. Two kids were killed at the Enclave. I no longer felt tired—I felt angry, which had always been my automatic response to every change in my life. I also felt very impatient to go back to where I came from, find Nana and ask her why the hell she’d sent a guy to tell me to look for my father when she already knew he was dead.
I went to the bathroom to wash my face and caught my reflection in the sink mirror. My first instinct was to turn away. It wasn’t just the eye patch. My straight, auburn-colored hair was all over the place. I usually kept my hair long enough to tie back and the side bangs to hide my eye when I needed to, and tonight, I’d kept it down because I’d gone out. So much for that. My skin was so white, I resembled a dead body. My cheeks were more hollow than I would have liked, and my lips seemed to always be dry, no matter how many Chapsticks I went through. Lipstick hid the dryness well and made them look pretty good and full, but the dark red one I’d put on before going out that night had already faded. I took off my eye patch and forced myself to look at my eyes. I used to always get compliments on them before. They were big and blue, and my lashes were so dense, they looked like eyeliner all around my eyes. Now, the eye I’d lost was almost completely white. No iris, no pupil, just a milky white mixed with just a bit of blue here and there. I even had a scar half an inch long on my lid, right under my brow, which had started out as a monstrosity I had been sure would never shrink. A reminder that I had almost lost my life and that Avery had lost hers. I splashed some cold water on my face and put those thoughts away for now.
Waiting for dawn was no longer an option. I was going back to Virginia right away.
3
It took more than nine hours to drive to Richmond, so I was forced to fly there instead. I hated heights so much I got mad by just thinking about a plane, but I had to endure the torture for almost t
wo hours.
When the plane finally touched down, I felt reborn.
There were a lot of high priests and priestesses in the city of Richmond, but only four of them had chosen to be masters of an Enclave.
Cornelius Graneheart was about forty, if you could believe your eyes, and rumor had it that he could conjure spells ever since he was a little kid. He was obsessed with money, and he ran his many businesses from a one-hundred-thousand-square-foot mansion, with a special wing for his harem. If you happened to run into him at a party, you wouldn’t look at him twice. Short guy with hair more grey than brown, olive skin and big brown eyes that could startle a kid in the dark, he wore oversized suits that hid his expensive watches perfectly. He had four women behind him at any given time—the kind men would give their left nut to be with and women would kill to be. But underneath that facade hid power to whisper words full of magical glue that would stick to reality and change it as he pleased. He also seemed to be a decent guy to hang around with, but one could never be too sure. That’s why he wasn’t ruled out as Nana’s attacker.
The second high priestess was Gwendolyn Love. She held grudges like little kids held onto their favorite toys, and she never forgot anything. Famous fashion houses made entire collections in her honor, and she would tell you the names of all the celebrities she’d fucked within the first ten minutes of meeting her. She was as gorgeous as was expected from a high priestess like her, with flawless skin, long blonde hair and breasts that would make a plastic surgeon drool. She was also very powerful—people didn’t call you high priestess for small things, and she’d had more than one grudge against Nana, so off she went to the suspects’ list.
