End Stage

by S A Magnusson

  “Why?” I thought of Jean-Pierre. Others on the vampire council had wanted to reveal more of the power. But Jean-Pierre was an older vampire, and he believed it was beneficial to keep the presence of the vampires secret. There was a part of me which thought it might be beneficial for those with magic to reveal their presence. Why not allow others to know about that? It wasn’t a matter of ruling or demonstrating power, though perhaps there was no harm in that.

  “You don’t need me to tell you why, Dr. Stone. You’re a smart woman, and you have seen incredible things. You’ve seen more than most on the mage council and even the shifter council have experienced. Because of that, you understand there are incredible dangers on the other side of the Veil. It’s the whole purpose of the Veil, the reason it exists in the first place. Without it, those creatures would be able to pass easily into our world.”

  “The Veil has existed for thousands of years,” Barden said, approaching slowly. He held onto a sense of magic, wrapped around him in a tight spiral. “There are stories of when the Veil was first placed, stories from before men were settled, and it was only after the Veil was placed that civilization appeared.”

  I looked at him. “Are you saying that had the earliest mages” – and shifters and vampires, I had to believe – “not placed the Veil, that civilization would not have occurred?”

  “It’s possible people might have eventually found a way to establish themselves, but in what form?” John Adams shrugged. “From what you’ve seen on this side of the Veil, and the way the fae are willing to use beings they consider to be lesser creatures, it leaves you to wonder what they might do to people. They feel it’s their right to rule.”

  I had no idea whether or not that was true. When we had been across the Veil before, we had spent little time trying to understand the fae. We had been trying to stay ahead of whatever attack was coming for us, and when the Ethear had come, I had wanted nothing more than to escape, to find the people we had come for, and get to safety.

  “How long has the organization been operating?” Barden asked.

  John Adams glanced over to Barden. “The organization has been operating in one form or another for the better part of a thousand years.”

  I thought about what Matt had told me, and that didn’t fit. “Why did Matt say otherwise?”

  “Matt wanted you to believe otherwise. It was part of his pitch to you.”

  “His pitch?”

  “In order for him to integrate with you, he needed to gain your trust.”

  I shook my head, hating the way it sounded, and hating that I understood just how effective it had been. Matt had gained my trust, and in doing so, he had ingratiated himself to me, yet he had then betrayed me. I wished I could go back, could use what I knew about him now, and eliminate him as a threat. If that had involved bringing him to Barden and holding him, then perhaps it would have been necessary.

  Then again, I didn’t know if Barden would have been able to hold Matt. Matt had proven himself far more capable than Barden in many ways, and without me learning from Matt about the spell coins, and how the organization used them to trigger magic, I didn’t know if Barden would have been able to do anything to stop him.

  “If the organization has been around for a thousand years, then why have they only gained notice now?”

  “There have been many forms of it over the years,” John Adams said. “In the earliest days, we operated as a part of the church. Why do you think there are so many conduits attached to the church?”

  “You mean the places you call neutral ground?”

  “I do. It’s a way of ensuring they survived through the ages, but there’s more to it than that.”

  “The organization did not place the neutral ground. That came from the councils,” Barden said.

  John Adams glanced over to Barden. “When has the council known how to place a neutral ground? You’ve lived within the magical world for a long time, Barden, and in all that time, have you ever seen any parts of the council who have known anything about placing neutral ground?”

  Barden was silent, answering that for me.

  “Lately, there has been a change to the neutral ground,” John Adams said.

  “There has?” I asked.

  Barden stiffened, saying nothing.

  “You knew about this,” I said to him.

  “I was aware something was taking place,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “We aren’t sure. We’re looking into it, but there aren’t many ways to fully understand. To really understand, you need to be able to cross the Veil more easily, and there aren’t many who can do that.”

  “Other than Kate.”

  “Seeing as how Dr. Michaels has preferred to spend her time on the other side of the Veil, there still aren’t so many. I am using all of my resources to better understand what’s taking place, but even in that, there are limitations.”

  I turned to John Adams. “What do you know about it?”

  “I know nothing more than Barden, I’m afraid. Then again, I have heard stirrings of a war on the other side of the Veil.”

  It was the same thing I had heard before. “We didn’t see any signs of war.”

  “It was not long-lived.”

  “Why do I get the sense that troubles you?”

  “Because it should trouble anyone who has any understanding of that side of the Veil. I haven’t spent a lot of time over there, but the time I have spent has shown me there is real danger, real power, and if they ever decide to attack and instigate war, anything to end it must be equally powerful.”

  “What do you think it was?”

  John Adams shrugged, turning to his coins. He started working through them again, pushing power into them as he created spells. He worked quickly, far more quickly than I had seen even Barden work, and in the space of thirty seconds, he seemed to have charged five coins. When I looked up to Barden, I could see he was watching John Adams closely, and I wondered if it impressed him.

  John finally spoke. “I don’t know, and as long as it stays on the other side, I don’t care.”

  “What about the Great Ones?”

  “The Great Ones have been separated from both our world and the other side of the Veil for a long time,” he said.

  “You knew that.”

  “Much like Barden, it’s my business to know.”

  “And you haven’t wanted to free them in order to take their power?”

  “There would’ve been no reason to do so.”

  “There wouldn’t have been any reason for you to try to claim one of the vampire elders to take their power, either.”

  “All of that was part of a greater plan,” John said.

  “To draw on Kate.”

  “Indirectly,” he said.

  “Why should I trust you that this isn’t part of some greater plan?”

  John Adams looked up, meeting my gaze. “You and your friend have proven that there is nothing I can change. Though I might want to, I have to accept my fate.”

  “You will understand if I have a hard time believing you,” Barden said, looking down at John Adams. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he still held onto power.

  “I’m sure you do, and yet…” John shook his head, turning his attention back to his coins. “When I lost her, it was the worst pain I’ve ever known. I wanted nothing more than to leverage every asset I had in order to try to bring her back.”

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “An accident.”

  “Can you talk about it?”

  He looked up, and there was pain in his eyes. I’d seen it before from plenty of parents who came into the emergency room, all too many of them suffering from something terrible that had claimed a child. It was a difficult emotion, and I suspected it would be incredibly difficult for him to fake. Seeing John Adams like that, seeing the pain behind his eyes, I had a hard time believing he could fake it.

  “She was working to better understand
the Veil.”

  “She was a mage?”

  “She was a Shara,” he said.

  I leaned back, watching him. “I didn’t realize she worked with you.”

  “She did. She was skilled. Strong. In time, I had little doubt she would have been able to replace me, and I was thrilled by it. She was smarter than me. Equally skilled with magic, and clever.”

  “What happened to her?” Barden asked, crouching next to me.

  “She was trying to understand one aspect of the Veil.”

  “What aspect was that?” I asked.

  “She wanted to better understand whether there were any reasons the Veil could be crossed that we wouldn’t recognize. She had long theorized there were far more crossings taking place than we ever knew, but she wanted to prove it to us.”

  “More crossings than the demons?” I asked.

  “The demons are just a part of what crosses the Veil. We like to think it’s impermeable, and that crossing is an incredibly difficult thing to do, but the more we learned about it, the more we came to understand the nature of the Veil, the more certain she was – and I was – that there was something else which came across the Veil.”

  “We’ve seen that there are multiple ways of crossing,” Barden said.

  “We’ve seen it too, but she was detecting more than just that. She suspected that more than just the demons coming across, there might be other creatures too.”

  “The fae,” Barden said.

  “The fae, but others as well.”

  Barden frowned. “Why would they have any interest in crossing?”

  John Adams shook his head. “I never understood that, either. Knowing how much crossing changes things, changing their magic, it seemed unusual for any creature to want to cross the Veil.”

  “What happened to your daughter?”

  “She was caught by something.”

  “You don’t know what it was,” I said.

  “No. We found her body. And that was it.”

  “Which was why you wanted to find Death,” Barden said.

  John Adams met his eyes. “Someone with such power should be able to bring her back. At least, I thought so. We held her, preserving her within magic, but…”

  “And that was why Kate said she couldn’t come back.”

  “I don’t know how long she was gone when we found her. It could have been weeks. And yet, her body was preserved. Warm. There was no heartbeat. Nothing.”

  I watched him, wondering if there was anything more that he wasn’t sharing with us. I didn’t have a lot of experience with magic that could simulate death, but if she was still in the condition he described, it was possible she had been placed into a similar stasis as the shifters. And if that were the case, perhaps she could come back. I wasn’t about to say that to John Adams, not wanting to torment him anymore. But I couldn’t help but wonder if Kate should have taken a look at her. With the power she had access to, it was possible Kate would have been able to do something, would have saved her, or perhaps she could have used her power somehow to rescue John Adams’s daughter.

  No one spoke for a long time, and Barden sat watching John Adams. “I lost my family when I was younger,” Barden finally said.

  “Barden?”

  He stared off into the distance, a faraway look in his eyes. There was a darkness around the corners of his eyes, and a hollowness to his voice. “It was a time when the councils still battled. The dark council was hidden, still underground, and we were forced to run whenever we encountered the mage council. Times were difficult, but it was a time of intrigue for me. I was learning my magic, learning to control it, and the more I worked with it, the more I understood what I was capable of doing.”

  He smiled tightly. And once again he fell silent. For a long time, no one spoke. The sounds of the forest seemed to swallow us.

  “I was experimenting with my power, trying to understand just what I could do. And I drew attention to us.” He took a deep breath. “My children were young at the time. My wife was young. She had a hint of magic, certainly not a lot, and my children were learning. They had potential. I could feel it from within them, the same way someone had felt that within me when I first developed my connection to the dark magic.” He laughed bitterly. “Dark magic. We call it that as if it’s black magic, something which makes the magic user evil. And now we know differently.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” I whispered.

  I could see the way it was tearing at Barden to share, the way it was ripping through him, his difficulty in admitting what had happened to his family. And yet I was curious. In all the time I’d known Barden, I had not learned what happened to his family. I understood there was some trauma, and that he had experienced significant loss, but Barden was quiet and reserved, and he kept it to himself.

  “I had ambushed three of the council. Knights. We fought more often back then, trying to position ourselves in such a way that we would intimidate them. I was powerful. Because of that, I could hold off multiple mages at one time, and it made it seem as if our numbers were larger.”

  I thought I understood where he was going with this.

  “And because of that, when they came for my family. They thought they were involved when they weren’t.” He fell silent. How could he have possibly worked with the mage council after what had happened?

  “You could have joined the organization,” John Adams said.

  “I didn’t know anything about the organization at the time. And even if I had, I don’t know I would have wanted anything to do with it. How could I, when nothing would have changed for me?”

  “Why wouldn’t it have changed?” I asked.

  “Because I wouldn’t have done anything differently. After what happened to them, I wanted nothing more than revenge, and was willing to do everything in my power in order to exact that revenge.”

  “That’s why you chased power.”

  “I chased power because I didn’t want the same thing to happen anyone else. I’ve always wanted to protect the people serving under me.” He sighed, looking at John for a moment, his expression softening. “I understand what you’ve gone through. I understand the nature of the torment you’ve experienced. I understand what it’s like losing someone you care about, someone who is gone far sooner than they should be.”

  John Adams held Barden’s eyes.

  “We still have to stop the others,” I said.

  “We will,” Barden said.

  “I’m not going to work against you,” John Adams said.

  “I know you’re not,” Barden said. With that, he got up, and he headed back toward the clearing, back toward Ariel and the others, and he left John Adams and me sitting there in silence.

  I watched as John Adams stared at Barden, his gaze lingering, and neither of us said anything for a long time.

  13

  The air crackled with energy, and we looked around the inside of the clearing. I held a fistful of spell coins, but the longer we stood here, the more certain I was that we were going to need to use far more power than what I thought it was going be able to do. We were ready to leave, and Ariel was dressed, in human form, though I wondered what would happen to her clothes the moment she needed to shift.

  The others were arranged around us. John Adams was there, as were Jean-Pierre and the chauffeur, a man whose name I still didn’t know. Barden remained off to the side, speaking softly to one of the shifters, though I wondered why he would focus on that particular man.

  We were ready to go, and the longer we waited, the more uncertain I was that we would find anything to help us.

  The sun was out, bright and warm, and I had to believe it was a good omen. Then again, we had only tonight and the following day in order to do what we needed. If we didn’t get it done in time, then the Shara were going to work whatever they were going to do with the Great Ones.

  As Barden approached, he held his hand up. “I need one of those coins.”

  I flipped through t
he pouch, taking out one of the transport coins. “Where are we going?”

  “If your suspicion is right, then we need to travel to the next nearest pack.”

  “You think we can really visit all the packs within a day?”

  “I don’t know if we can. I don’t know if we have enough power or magic, but seeing as how there are only a few who know where any of the packs are, then we will need to work quickly.”

  “What happens if we can’t find all of them?”

  “We have to do our best.”

  “And what if by bringing Ariel with us, we are doing exactly what the Shara want?”

  That was what had troubled me. The more I thought about it, the more uncertain I was that we were somehow working to some plan of the Shara. They had failed to recover Ariel the first time. If we went hunting after them, looking for the other packs, how could we know they weren’t following us in order to find those other packs, but to also find Ariel? And if they did, we were going to be responsible for bringing the Shara exactly what they wanted.

  I turned to John Adams. “Where would Matt bring the alphas once he gathered them?”

  “I am not sure. There are many possible places, but –“

  “Any place he might bring them would have to be a place of power. If it was going to work in the way we suspect, then he would have to have a way of drawing their power out, and finding enough to free the Great Ones.” And I had no idea what that was going to be.

  I couldn’t help but think Matt wasn’t going to go too far from what he knew. Maybe it was tied to the headquarters of the organization, but if he did that, then he was going to draw their attention. We still didn’t know how well connected to the organization Matt and the Shara had remained. It was possible the rest of the organization had truly exiled them as they claimed, though we also didn’t know if they had welcomed them back. Who was to say that the Shara wouldn’t be welcomed back into the organization for the sake of stability?

  “It would have to be a place where power can be drawn to it,” Ariel said, approaching. “It would be a place with a proximity to the other side of the Veil.”

  “Why?” I asked.