by S. M. Reine
“But she was the only one of you three who actually studied during our year with Pamela,” he protested.
Christine’s whole face darkened. “Sometimes, studying isn’t enough.”
Ariane arrived that weekend. James watched from his bedroom window as Landon dropped her off. There was no sign of her supposed boyfriend, that Isaac guy. She was alone. Ariane was wearing a long, loose dress with her hair gathered in glittering clips.
Pamela embraced her and led the girl inside. James ran into the living room to meet her, but by the time he got there, she had been taken into one of the bedrooms. Every door was shut.
“What’s going on?” he asked Christine, who was reading a book on the couch.
She placed a bookmark between the pages. “Nothing, as far as you’re concerned. Go outside.”
Disappointed, James did as his sister ordered. She could hardly bully him anymore; he was a very tall twelve-year-old, and she still had to catch her breath when she walked across a room. But nobody nagged like Christine. If she wanted him to go outside, she would make sure that he went outside.
He spent his afternoon wasting time in the forest, but returned a few hours later. He kicked a rock through the garden, sending it jittering and dancing over the brick path. When he passed the open window of his sister’s bedroom, he heard a strange sound: a soft, feminine noise that sounded like it was being muffled into a pillow.
James paused to peer into her room, but the curtains were drawn. He couldn’t see anything. But someone was definitely crying, and it didn’t sound like Christine.
He sneaked into the house and checked Pamela’s office. His aunt was seated in an active circle of power, and she was lost in meditation.
Slipping past her office, he eased the handle of his sister’s door down and opened it to peek through the crack. He could see Ariane sitting on the foot of the bed with her hands in her lap.
“I can’t believe it,” Christine was saying somewhere out of sight. “Why you?”
“He said my skills were most suitable, so I volunteered.”
“You volunteered ?”
“It’s important, Christine. There’s nothing more important than this.”
Ariane ran a hand down the front of her dress, and James realized that the voluminous material concealed a strange curve to her stomach. For a moment, he had the unkind thought that she was a lot fatter than he remembered—and then he realized that it was the only place she had gained weight.
She was pregnant.
His sharp intake of breath made Christine look up. Before he could slip back into the shadows, she crossed the room, threw open the door, and grabbed his arm. “You snooping little prick!”
“Hey! Let me go!” he protested. For a weak girl, she had an awfully strong grip.
Ariane’s voice whipped through the air. “Christine! Let him in.”
James shook his sister off and stepped inside. Christine shut the door firmly behind him. “You’re pregnant,” he said, circling around Ariane. She nodded. Her rosy cheeks shone with moisture.
“Yes, I am. That’s why I’ve come here. Isaac is hunting a rogue overlord right now, and it’s too risky for me like…like this.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Her cheeks dimpled. “Don’t be sorry. I’m very happy. The problem is…” Ariane trailed off, and her gaze burrowed deep into James’s skull, as if she was seeing all kinds of things that he didn’t want anyone to see.
He shifted on his feet. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Christine gave a short laugh. “Everyone knows. Landon even congratulated her. Can you believe it?”
There was something wrong about an adult congratulating a sixteen-year-old on her pregnancy. James thought back to the tall man called Metaraon inspecting the adepts, and Ariane binding as an aspis when she couldn’t even drive yet, and the swell of her stomach under her shirt. Yeah, there was definitely something wrong.
James sat on the bed next to her and took her hand. “It’s okay,” he said firmly, even though it wasn’t. But he thought that it sounded reassuring. “Tell me what I can do to help you.”
“You are very sweet,” Ariane said, patting his cheek. “Do you know what you can do to help?”
“What?”
“Never, ever go anywhere near my daughter.”
James spent a lot of time thinking about that short conversation with Ariane. Never, ever go anywhere near my daughter. Was that meant to be for his safety or the baby’s? The latter didn’t make any sense. James was hardly a threat.
One thing he did understand, with sudden clarity, was that there were secrets in his coven. Secrets that even he, the nephew of the high priestess, couldn’t begin to fathom.
Secrets that he could only learn by immersing himself in them.
He went to Pamela that weekend. She was writing another paper spell at her desk, and she looked strangely old and shrunken in her high-backed chair. Her black hair was streaked with white. Her skin was the consistency of the paper she wrote upon. “What do you need, sweetheart?”
“Can you tell Landon that I’m ready to initiate?”
Pamela set down her pen, gave him a sad smile, and nodded.
James was initiated that week. Isaac killed his demon a few days later, and Ariane left to be reunited with her kopis.
Christine died two weeks after that.
Her funeral was held in the woods outside of Pamela’s house. James followed the pallbearers from a distance, watching his father shudder as he carried her casket to a grave that had already been prepared. He could hear his mother sobbing behind him, and it sounded so distant, like James was a million miles away from his family.
Rain sprinkled on the clearing. The entire coven had gathered to honor Christine, and they milled around the disturbed earth of her grave wearing black robes. Ariane and Isaac stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the opposite side of the grave. Even underneath a loose sweater, James could see that she was growing quickly. Isaac looked skinny next to her.
The ceremony was short. Landon said some words about eternity, and cycles, and the everlasting nature of souls.
And then it was over. The crowd broke apart.
James pushed through the coven to reach Ariane’s side.
“Hi,” he said.
She clutched the cross necklace over her heart, as if in prayer. “Do you…do you know what killed her?”
He did. In fact, Pamela had given James two explanations for his sister’s passing: first, the publicly known cause of death that had been allegedly diagnosed by doctors; and second, the actual cause of death that had been diagnosed by the coven.
The first reason was heart failure. An unknown defect.
The second reason was accidental suicide via magic.
Pamela had explained that, apparently, Christine had been struggling to catch up with James so that she could impress their family. She enchanted objects with greater and greater spells, none of which she was capable of handling. When she ran out of animals to sacrifice, she began drawing off of her own life force.
After months of abuse, all it had taken was a single candlelight spell to do her in.
Saying that out loud would have felt like admitting that James had killed his sister, and Ariane was already crying. So what he told her was, “It was an accident. An awful accident.”
She nodded and sobbed even harder.
He didn’t know what to say after that. Ariane and Christine had been close friends—much closer than James and Christine had ever been. He wanted to apologize for telling Christine that he was better than her, and that he was sorry for making her cry, and sorriest of all that he hadn’t trusted her enough to be more involved in her studies. But telling Ariane that wouldn’t fix anything. She had much bigger worries anyway.
Ariane saved him from having to think of consoling words by reaching out to take his hand. “I’m going to name my baby after her. I would like to give her ‘Christine’ as a middle name.”
“She
would have liked that,” James said.
“Yes. I think so.”
Isaac finally spoke up. “Sorry for your loss, Faulkner.”
It was the first time that James had ever heard Isaac speak, and it rang out as unemotional and inauthentic. His voice was deep and dead. He didn’t even change expression when he said it.
James studied the kopis in the gray light of the storm. He had a hawk-like nose, eyes slanted in such a way that he would always look angry, even if he smiled, and a long scar running from one temple to the corner of his mouth. Now that he was standing right in front of him, James realized that his original estimation of Isaac’s stature had been wrong. The man wasn’t skinny; he was lean, but densely packed with muscle. He vibrated with tension, as if he might snap at any moment.
Isaac was, in short, absolutely terrifying.
Ariane embraced James. Her belly was a hard lump between them. “You will make the right choices and do good things,” she whispered into his ear. “You won’t let your thirst for knowledge destroy you. Promise me that.”
It seemed like such a weird thing to request, but James would have told her anything to make the crying stop. “I promise.”
December 1982
The first Christmas after James’s sister died was somber. The Faulkners didn’t decorate a tree, bake cookies, or sing carols, as they had every year prior to that. Instead, they ate a quiet dinner of ham and sweet potatoes on Christmas Eve, and went to bed early.
James awoke to find snow outside and Pamela talking on the phone in the kitchen. She hung up when he stepped out.
“Merry Christmas, Auntie,” James said, kissing her on the cheek. He hadn’t called her that since he was much younger than his very noble age of twelve, but the name always made her smile, and there were far too few smiles in the house.
She didn’t smile. “And to you, James.”
“Who was that on the phone?”
“That was Landon,” Pamela said, opening the refrigerator to remove a carton of eggs. “Find a whisk. I’m cooking scrambled eggs, and you can make yourself useful by starting on the pancakes.”
He did as instructed. “What did Landon want?”
“Ariane gave birth this morning, just two hours ago. She and the baby are perfectly healthy. Six pounds, fourteen ounces. Nursing well.”
“That’s nice,” he said. His aunt frowned. “That’s…not nice?”
She huffed. “Of course all of that is nice , but the baby has tested positive as a kopis.”
Surprise washed over James. Ariane had seemed so certain that she was pregnant with a girl, but all kopides were men. He supposed that meant that the baby wouldn’t be named after Christine, after all.
“Excellent,” James said. “So what’s his name?”
Pamela cracked an egg. The yolk hit the skillet and sizzled.
“Her name is Elise.”
II
High Trial
1
November 2009
Elise was sharpening one of her falchions. The steady whisk-whisk of the file scraping along the edge of the blade was as comforting and repetitive as a heartbeat. James had fallen asleep to that sound on so many countless nights that he struggled to sleep without it sometimes.
They were in Saudi Arabia. The room they rented was small, and the window had no glass to keep out the unrelenting heat. Elise had removed her headscarf in the privacy of their room, and her auburn curls stuck out in every direction like she had been electrocuted. Her hair fell all the way down her back and veiled her freckled shoulders, but that wasn’t right. She hadn’t grown her hair that long until after retirement, and James and Elise hadn’t been in the Middle East since she was a teenager.
He watched her work from his bed without sitting up, head propped on his arms. The woman sitting by the window wasn’t a teenager. She was beautiful, mature, battle-worn, scarred. Her hair clung to the hard lines of her cheekbones and jaw.
Elise lifted the blade into the sunlight and blew metal fragments off the edge, but the file continued making a soft whisk-whisk even after she set it aside.
“You could ruin the geometry if you file that much more,” James said. That was what he had told her at the time, when she was sixteen.
In reality, when they had really been visiting Saudi Arabia, she had ignored his words of caution. Now she set her sword beside the whetstone and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you have a lighter?”
“You don’t smoke,” James said.
The cigarette was already lit. She put it to her lips, sucked in a breath, blew out smoke. “You don’t know anything about me.”
He was kneeling in front of her, watching her profile silhouetted against the harsh daylight. Light blazed behind her, but he didn’t know if it was the sun or the glow of a distant garden lit with angelfire.
Elise returned the cigarette to her lips. A line of blood trickled from her nose and detoured around the curve of her lip.
James swallowed against the lump in his throat. “I’m so sorry.” He reached up to brush the blood away with his thumb. It smeared on her cheek.
She didn’t react to his touch. Her skin was so cold that her freckles were turning blue.
Elise’s brow knitted, and she coughed. “Hell,” she muttered in the same tone of voice she used whenever she realized that she had made a mistake in the accounting for Motion and Dance. Annoyed, but casual. Black blood trickled from her hairline down her neck to pool around her collarbone.
James patted his pockets, searching for the Book of Shadows. “I can heal that.”
“You can’t fix everything.” She stubbed the cigarette out on her palm. Flesh sizzled. Above that, he could still hear her sharpening her swords. Whisk, whisk, whisk . It pulsed through the room. “Sometimes, I don’t think you can fix anything.”
There it was. He pulled the Book out of his pocket and opened it.
Every page was blank.
“Wait,” he said, “I’m sure I just filled this last week.”
“I took all your magic with me when I died.” She flicked the cigarette out the window. “You didn’t need it, did you?”
He searched within himself and found her words to be true—he was empty. He couldn’t have reached his magic with or without prefabricated spells. “How am I supposed to help you like this?”
“You’re years too late.”
Elise bent to kiss James. She tasted like blood.
The first time she had kissed him, he had assumed it was on a teenage whim. Maybe a misplaced sense of obligation, like she thought that she owed him something. But there it was again, nine years later—same lips, same pained expression, same resignation when she drew back. Her hair swirled around them, gathered by the wind generated by the blade of a helicopter’s rotor.
“Still?” he asked, unable to think of anything better to say. What an idiot. He should have said something—anything —to keep her from jumping.
“Always,” Elise replied, looking sad. He was never going to forget how sad she looked, as if she had discovered that he had been lying to her for so many years. And then, “Bye, James.”
He tried to grab her wrist, but she was already a ghost. Her arm slipped through his grasp.
She jumped. Fell away from him. He leaned out the door of the helicopter to watch her disappear into the darkness and snow.
That was the last time he would ever see her.
Whisk, whisk, whisk…
Elise was still sharpening her falchions. It wasn’t comforting anymore. The sound taunted him.
It would have been so much easier if you had loved me…
“Sir?”
Always…
“Excuse me, sir?”
Pressure against his arm. The helicopter, the endless night, the sight of a distant Reno fallen under a shadow of evil—it all faded away. The sound of Elise sharpening her swords grew louder. Changed into scraping.
People were moving. Cloth rubbing against cloth. Quiet conversations.
> James’s eyelids were so difficult to open. His head was a dead weight pressed against the plastic window of an airplane.
He sat up, wiping drool from the corner of his mouth, and saw that the hand on his arm belonged to a flight attendant. She had brown hair. Freckles on her nose. A round face and a polite-but-concerned smile. Not Elise—a stranger. She smelled like flowery perfume, and he doubted that her soft hands had ever been curled around the hilt of a sword.
Behind her, across the aisle, a small child was rubbing his shoes against the metal strip on the floor over and over again while his parents chatted and ignored him. That was the sound that James had heard. Not Elise sharpening her swords. Some little boy with white-yellow curls rubbing his feet on the ground. The same boy who had been playing noisy games on a smart phone for the entire three-hour trip.
“We’ve arrived in Denver,” said the flight attendant, drawing his attention back to her again. The wings on her blouse said “Eloise.” Cruel irony. “It’s time to disembark.”
He sat up with a groan, rubbing a hand over his eyes. The light drove spikes directly through his reading glasses into his brain.
James thought he managed to say something like, “Thank you.”
He knew he must have managed to remove his carry-on from the overhead storage compartment and navigate the crowded aisle to the exit, because he found himself holding his bag by Gate B14 a few minutes later, not quite sure when he had gotten off or where he was.
Denver—the flight attendant had said Denver. Two long, pointless layovers since he’d left the Sacramento airport, and he was finally in Denver. The Union had given him a free flight to visit his old coven. Apparently “free” didn’t equate to “direct.”
He turned on his cell phone. There was a text message from Hannah Pritchard, his former fiancée, who was picking him up in a silver Honda. They had made the arrangements before he left California.
Her message only said, “I’m waiting in the garage ,” and it took James three tries to read it.
