by Ella M. Lee
Nicolas put his hands back to the keys and started into the haunting first notes of Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. I listened to him play, my eyes closed. Lacrimosa, a word for weeping sadness. No questions as to why this mournful piece had popped into his head.
I wasn’t as well-versed in classical music as Nicolas, but I had sung in chorus during high school and played violin briefly before realizing I would never be terribly good. I loved that Nicolas could be soothed by music, because I found that it soothed me too.
When Nicolas finished the song, he paused for a moment, then pulled the fallboard down to cover the keys once again.
I rested my head on his shoulder. “Thank you for playing.”
“It was my pleasure,” he replied. Nicolas was unfailingly polite to people he liked.
“You look exhausted,” I said, studying the lines around his eyes and the tense set of his jaw.
“It’s not every day I have to literally invent new magic,” he said, somewhat icily. He closed his eyes.
I wrapped an arm around his waist. “Come to bed with me?”
He was silent and still for so long I thought he may have already fallen asleep, but then he said, “Yes, I’d love to.”
Chapter 18
The next day was the hardest day of training I had experienced in ages. I had gotten into a comfortable rhythm with Daniel—we pushed one another, but not much. With Ryan, I tended to focus on the same work over and over, mostly surrounding transmutation. Ryan was a stickler for technique and drilling good habits.
Nicolas was a different story.
He was powerful and relentless, and he didn’t go easy on me. We stood in the middle of our group’s training room on the sparring mat as though we were about to fight.
After explaining some theory and techniques about how I could hold my shield against him, he attacked me again and again. Every single attempt resulted in my shield being blown apart by him instantly.
Shield. Poof!
Adjust. Shield. Poof!
Adjust. Shield. Poof!
This went on for almost an hour. The last several shields had held for a second or so more than my first attempts, but I was still horrible against him, nervous and shaky. He didn’t seem to care. He was singularly focused and frustrated trying to figure out how he could get me to hold against his impeccable magic. He had barely moved during this time, studying me with his arms crossed.
On maybe our fiftieth attempt, Nicolas’s latest lecture on shield power demands was interrupted by Daniel, who breezed casually into the training room.
“I’m not staying,” he said, cutting off Nicolas’s chiding. “I’m just picking up some stuff. Like I want to listen to your lectures more often than I have to, Dr. Demarais.”
I watched Daniel remove several long knives from the weapons rack. He looked better than he had yesterday, moving now with his usual grace.
“Let’s go,” Nicolas said, snapping his fingers to draw my attention. I had barely pulled my shield back up before he shattered it again.
And again.
Daniel turned to watch, narrowing his eyes at me thoughtfully.
Yet again, my shield died under Nicolas’s attack.
Daniel sheathed his weapons and walked to me.
“One second,” he said to Nicolas, holding up a hand.
He stopped in front of me, putting his arms on my shoulders. I looked away, nervous about our interactions in front of Nicolas.
“Bring up your shield for me,” he said quietly.
I did as Dan asked, calming my magic so that it wouldn’t react to his touch.
He leaned in closer, examining me with his own magic. “Okay. Your shield is good, very strong, but there’s a last little piece you’re missing. Nicolas is getting past you because you’re flinching.”
He circled me, coming to stand behind me.
“Feet a little more apart.” Dan put his hand on my lower back, pushing in. “Stand straighter.” He then let his hands rest heavily on my collar. “Shoulders relaxed. Say your name.”
“Fiona Ember,” I said quietly.
His hands pressed into my shoulders. “Louder. Stronger.”
“Fiona Ember.”
“And what is your job?”
“Lieutenant in Water Clan.”
He circled back around, assessing my stance.
“Chin up,” he said, smiling. “Confidence, Fi.”
I took a deep breath, trying to exude the type of poise and self-assuredness that Nicolas and Dan both possessed.
“Better,” he said. “Keep that position. You’re expecting the attack and drawing yourself inward, scared and nervous. That’s locking up your shield, making it brittle and inflexible. Stay relaxed and loose, not tense. Don’t think of your shield as a hard wall about to take a massive hit. It’s not that. It’s more like a flexible net, ready to bounce. Let it move and grow. Water wants to move. Don’t be so afraid to work with it, okay?”
I nodded, trying to memorize this stance, tried to let his words sink in. “Okay.”
He stepped back a few paces. “I’m going to try now,” he said. “Shield up. Ready? Relax and… hold.”
I felt his magic shimmering around me, a million little claws trying to drag at my shield so they could find a way to destroy it. I usually would have shied away, expecting the familiar feeling of my magic being blown apart uncomfortably. This time, I pushed out, blooming my shield into a woven net, a sail billowing in the wind.
I held for at least six seconds before the press of Dan’s magic overwhelmed me and my shield collapsed.
He smiled. “Good. See? No need to be so nervous all the time. You have it. Now beat Nicolas,” he said, waving at me as he danced back out of the room.
Nicolas was smiling slightly. He didn’t appear to have any ill will toward Daniel.
“I suppose Dan isn’t completely useless,” he said. “He knows you well. Ready to try against me?”
“Just a moment,” I said. “I’m dizzy. I need some water.”
I sighed and retrieved a bottle of water from the fridge in the corner of the room. I leaned against the wall. Every single time my shield was smashed, it felt like a piece of me was smashed.
Nicolas waited in the center of the room, with his arms still folded casually across his chest.
“Why did Dan call you Dr. Demarais?” I asked.
Daniel loved needling Nicolas, but the words hadn’t sounded like a taunt that time.
He blinked, surprised. “Because I hold a Ph.D.”
“You do?” I said, stunned. “In what?”
“Immunology. My undergrad was in biology and chemistry, and my master’s degree was in cell biology. You seem surprised. I told you I have a scientific mind. That’s what drew me to Smoke.”
“You just seem to care so little for mortals that I can’t imagine you studying the human body,” I said, shaking my head.
He smiled. “I actually enjoy all sciences quite a lot. I used to be a very dedicated non-magical researcher too. I was even published in Cell,” he said, citing one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. “That is one thing I miss about Smoke, the only thing I miss. In Smoke, I led several research teams. My work here is clearly more action-oriented.”
“You couldn’t pull together a group like that here? Do scientific research instead of field operations?” I asked.
“It wasn’t right for my path here in Water, for how my life had changed. I like that we’re researching new magic though. That’s different and more exciting to me than previous projects,” he said. He beckoned me forward. “Let’s continue, keeping Daniel’s advice in mind. You might not get this down today, but I know you’ll figure it out eventually.”
Now that my general grasp on Water magic and transmutation was strong, Daniel wanted me learning new and inventive things. He liked to be clever in his magic usage—a trait he got from Ryan—and he encouraged me to do the same.
Teng was pleased to tea
ch me advanced elemental magic that worked well in combat. Nicolas trained me on strengthening my shielding abilities and also on breaking shields of all kinds. I wasn’t amazing, but I was getting better. I had yet to break his incredible personal shield, but I was gaining an understanding of how to approach commander-level magic with my own.
Daniel himself taught me a lot of the fun tricks he knew for throwing magic more precisely and elegantly. I had once seen him draw and shoot glorious arrows of Water magic—as well as transmuted lightning—and I begged him to show me how to do it. He seemed excited to try it with my transmuted fire magic, so I pestered him for a few days in a row until he cleared a morning to teach me.
I occasionally tried to work more with blood magic, but it didn’t come easily and wasn’t really meant to mesh with Water. I eventually gave up on trying to push it further in favor of more traditional Water magic skills. Still, I liked having something in me that made me a little unique among Nicolas’s spectacular collection of magicians. I often found myself around Nicolas and Daniel’s group members—we passed each other in the clan house, we ate meals nearby one another, and we shared our group’s meeting spaces and training spaces. I got to know them in small doses, and I was feeling more and more comfortable with them over time.
The exception to this trend was Irina. She was very rarely around, which seemed to be a point of contention between her and Nicolas that Daniel was constantly assuaging and mediating. Dan had told me she was spending a lot of time at the Vancouver clan house, but the holidays and Dan’s promotion had lured her back to her home here in Hong Kong.
She was often doing work for him in Japan these days, sorting out the details of where we might live. I was surprised by this until Daniel told me that she was half Japanese and spoke the language fluently.
Nevertheless, I was caught off guard when the training room door opened one day, and in walked Irina. I had been studying advanced wards, curled up on a couch in the sunlight. Usually Sylvio or Athena would be around, running through their exercise routines, but they were both absent on operations that weekend.
Irina looked like her usual grave self: pale, with her platinum hair swept back into a sleek bun, dressed in designer cashmere. She was carrying a very classic Saint Laurent black tote bag. Her eyes found me immediately.
“Hello,” I said awkwardly, nodding my head.
As Daniel’s lieutenant, I was confident about my position in Water Clan, and I no longer felt as afraid around Irina as I had in my first weeks here. She still had decades more tenure in the clan than me, but I was well-liked here, and things were going decently with the magic and my role.
“Yes, hello,” she said, channeling Nicolas’s cold offhandedness.
I watched out of the corner of my eye as she plucked several books off the shelf and stacked them on the meeting table. After a minute or two of studiously ignoring me, she seemed to recall something. To my surprise, she came to the couch and sat down a couple of feet from me, drawing her legs up under her.
I sat up straight, wary but interested in why she might be approaching me.
She studied me with pursed lips. “Fiona, I have to say, I was astonished when Nicolas told me the two of you are together.”
I suppressed an eye roll and a sigh, wondering where this was going.
“How you could ever love someone like that?” she asked carefully.
“Don’t you love him?” I asked, bewildered. “You’ve been in his group since the beginning.”
“Nicolas and I have an understanding,” she said. “I don’t love him. I wouldn’t even say we are friends. I healed him when he left Smoke at Ryan’s behest. Nicolas repaid me by helping me when I otherwise would have been completely screwed here. His plans for our future interest me, and I have a great deal of respect for his talent and accomplishments, but his past is too sickening for my taste.”
Her word choice caught my attention. “Sickening?”
Her confused look slowly resolved into alarm, and her lips twisted in annoyance. “He hasn’t told you, has he? About his past? The things he did in Smoke? You are young; of course you never heard.”
“He did research,” I said. “Projects that had to do with… binding magic to inanimate objects.” I shrugged. “It was so long ago. I didn’t really ask.”
She exhaled sharply. “Maybe you should. Before Nicolas was the Auspex, he was called Death’s Alchemist, and that name was not given out of love. He came to Water with epithets like butcher and murderer and mad scientist. I was very reluctant to meet him when Ryan first asked it of me.”
She paused, glancing out the window for a brief moment.
“I’m not sure how much he’s changed in fifteen years. Maybe a lot. Maybe only a little.” Her eyes wandered back to mine, dark and concerned and sincere. “But do you want to love a man who killed innocent magicians so that he could stuff their souls into enchanted objects? Who didn’t care who he hurt in his search for answers? Who justified that by calling it ‘research’? What does that make you?”
My heart pounded, my blood turning to ice within me.
It would be so easy to deny it, to say there was some sort of misunderstanding. But… it fit all too well. I knew precisely how driven Nicolas was, precisely what lengths he would go to in order to achieve his goals. Although Irina and I weren’t friends, she had known Nicolas for a very long time, and I didn’t think she would lie about this. I was wary of her intentions for revealing this piece of information, but I couldn’t doubt the words themselves.
It honestly sounded exactly like Nicolas, who obviously enjoyed his ego and his power and had alluded before to having a monstrous, bloody past. I just hadn’t thought closely about what that might mean, or what I would think of it when the full story was revealed.
It was decades ago, but did decades erase sin? I had no idea, but the creeping coldness and writhing in the pit of my stomach told me the answer might not be a positive one.
“Thank you for the insight,” I said stiffly, “but I don’t care what loving him makes me into in your eyes.”
That was a lie. I cared a lot about what people thought of me, and I cared a lot about what people thought of the man I loved, but I wasn’t about to let Irina see that she had rattled me.
She shook her head and shrugged sadly. She gathered her books and left. I watched her, frozen, unable to draw too deep of a breath, trying to figure out what I was supposed to feel now.
Nicolas wasn’t in his apartment—not a surprise, as he often booked meetings all afternoon. I sent him a text.
I’m sure you’re busy, but Irina spooked me today, and I really need to talk to you. Find me IMMEDIATELY.
Despite the urgency in my words, I didn’t get a text back for almost an hour.
I’m in Dublin until 17:00 HKT.
It was only one o’clock in the afternoon in Hong Kong. Another text from him came in.
What is it? I can try to help from here.
I hesitated. This wasn’t a discussion I wanted to have without the ability to look Nicolas in the eye and see his responses. I wrote back:
I really need to see you in person. Irina told me some things about your past, and I need to know if what she said is true.
There was a long pause where I watched Nicolas’s typing bubbles go on and off sporadically. He must have deleted things, because all he sent back was:
Is this about my work in Smoke?
My next words came out in an anxious and quick torrent.
Yes. Why didn’t you tell me the details? Why did you wait to tell me something so important about yourself? Were you hiding this intentionally?
He sent back several texts in a row.
I am very different now from the person I was in Smoke. My past isn’t relevant to who I am in Water, or what you and I have together. I will explain everything to you.
I can be back at 16:00 HKT.
I love you.
I stared at the words for a long time, but I couldn’t figure o
ut a response.
Irina had used the word “sickening.” It was a good word for a man who had killed people so ruthlessly and for such a superfluous purpose. I felt sickened, certainly, but I was trying to figure out why. Nicolas was right—it didn’t have a lot of bearing on the person I had come to know these past months.
But I was hurt that he had avoided telling me what he’d done and confused about how I was supposed to feel.
I sat on my couch, frozen, trying to dig out a complete thought and a cohesive emotion from the tumultuous storm that was my heart.
True to his word, Nicolas knocked on my door at five minutes past four in the afternoon. I was curled up on my couch, wrapped in a blanket.
He seemed grave and upset when he entered my apartment. He was wearing a rumpled black jacket and his hair was messy. He snapped a shield and a silencing spell into place and came to sit on the couch. I sat up, making room for him, shying away.
“You’re unhappy with me,” he said carefully.
“Why didn’t you tell me about what you did in Smoke?” I asked, my throat tight.
“I told you, it’s not relevant. It’s not who I am anymore. It was so long ago.”
“Who else knows?” I asked.
“Here in Water? A good number of people, including Ryan and most of my older group members.”
“Daniel?” I asked. Did my sweet, endearing commander know Nicolas’s secrets?
“Yes,” Nicolas said. “He has heard that story.”
“So I’m the only idiot who didn’t know.”
He hesitated. “I had a reputation coming here from Smoke. My name was known back then in many clans. There’s a reason it was so easy for me to come here and pretend to be a monster, to rise quickly.”
