A Wild Light

by Marjorie Liu

  I sank to my knees. Zee crowded close, and Aaz was there, and Raw. Dek and Mal licked the backs of ears, but their purrs were ragged, weak.

  “What,” I asked slowly, “was that about?”

  “History,” Zee muttered. “Bad things.”

  “You fought another war before your conflict with the Aetar.” I rubbed my throat. “This thing possessed you five. You weren’t born with it. You let it in, because you thought you needed it.”

  Zee said nothing, but looked at the other boys. All of them, with their large eyes. Raw started sucking his claws—stopped—then started again.

  “What was so terrible?” I whispered. “Who was the enemy?”

  “Don’t ask,” Zee muttered. “Gone now. Gone.”

  I wanted to know. I needed to. But there was such pain in their faces, and loss. I couldn’t bring myself to keep hammering them.

  “Okay,” I said. “So why doesn’t this . . . force . . . just take me over, fully? Make me lead the army? Make me do whatever the hell it wants?”

  “Not like that,” Zee rasped helplessly. “Power is.”

  “Is what?” I wanted to shake him. “Zee.”

  “Told you,” he said, with misery in his voice. “Choice.”

  I blew out my breath. “Right. Just like that.”

  “Always,” Zee said. “Even us, we choose. Choose wrong, choose right, choose to hold our mothers, bright. We changed. Choices changed.”

  “Even with this . . . thing . . . inside you?”

  Zee pressed his claws over my heart. “Takes as much you give.”

  I covered his hand. “What the fuck is it?”

  Raw sucked his claws a little harder. Aaz closed his eyes. Dek, Mal, rested their chins against my ears and began massaging my scalp with their tiny claws.

  “Old,” Zee breathed.

  Old. Powerful. Inside me.

  I covered my face. “I need a drink.”

  Moments later, Aaz tapped my shoulder and pushed a cup into my hand. Not hot chocolate, this time. Hot cider, instead. Burned my mouth, but I sipped it down, trying not to shake.

  Remember who you are, I told myself. You’re Maxine.

  I heard footsteps echoing up the stairs, all the way from the other side of the roof. The steady click of a cane accompanied that heavy tread.

  Grant faltered when he saw me, but only in his gaze—deepening with that raw glint I knew so well: intense, thoughtful, not at all gentle. I recalled what it felt like to see that expression fresh, as a stranger would. Surreal sensation. Grant, I tended to forget, was an intimidating man.

  “Hey,” he rumbled. “What scared you?”

  “Not even going to pretend?”

  He grunted and settled down beside me with a wince. I handed him my hot cider, pulled his bad leg into my lap, and began massaging his thigh just above the knee. Raw scooted close to work on his calf, long claws searching out pressure points. Dek and Mal began humming Billy Joel’s “She’s Got a Way.”

  “This thing inside me,” I said, slowly, “has a mind of its own.”

  Zee gave me a quick look. All the boys did. I pretended not to notice. There was more I could tell Grant, but not now. Not until I had time to think.

  He knew I was holding back, though. I wasn’t subtle. Instead of pressuring me, he leaned back against the wall, watching my face, sipping cider.

  “It’s wet down here,” he said, with all the mildness of a man trying very hard not to be an ass.

  “Rain,” I replied. “What’s up with Jack?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Extraction completed. Raw helped, before disappearing.”

  He set down the cider and pulled out his mother’s amulet. “Jack returned this.”

  I removed the seed ring from my vest pocket and held it up beside the amulet. The designs were different, but both objects blurred my vision, as though I was looking at 3- D art—only, without the glasses.

  “Huh,” Grant said.

  “Want to take bets that the thing inside Mary—and the bone that Jack removed from his arm—are also seed rings?”

  He frowned, cradling the amulet in his hands. “I don’t know how I feel about that. Memories are sacred. So are thoughts. I see them all the time. Sometimes . . . it’d be nice if I didn’t. But if this is a seed ring, and some part of my mother, or someone else, is stored within . . .” He stopped and slipped the amulet’s chain over his head. “How did our lives get so complicated?”

  Just because, I wanted to say, but silence felt better. I looked back at the door to the stairs, and the golden light spilling out from the apartment below. “I would love to run away.”

  “We should go to Paris, or Vienna.”

  “Egypt. I’d have an excuse to cover my arms.”

  “I know Rome like the back of my hand.”

  I smiled. “You ever think about handing the homeless shelter over to someone else?”

  “More and more frequently.”

  “What would you do with your time?”

  “Be a better man.”

  “Not possible. You’re perfect.”

  Grant kissed my cheek. “Come on. Let’s find out what’s so important about Jack’s arm.”

  We held hands as we walked across the roof. I thought about Paris, Rome.

  And the cut in the prison veil.

  You should be there, part of me thought. Standing guard.

  But guarding the break wouldn’t do any good, either. Not long term, not when some fragment of an army waited on the other side, ready to fall down upon this world.

  This world, where no one believed in magic. Those demons would descend, and with them, chaos. I didn’t know if they could be stopped with guns. Maybe. But there wouldn’t be enough guns—or people trained to use them—to keep humanity safe.

  Soccer moms and their kids, rounded up by Mahati. Hospitals and schools and shopping malls. I tried to imagine Lord Ha’an leading his scarred, hungry Mahati through downtown Seattle, and it was both ridiculous and terrifying.

  And so close. It could happen at any moment.

  We have to close the veil, I thought. We have to.

  Downstairs, the windows had been thrown open, but the air still smelled like bleach. I didn’t see Rex, but Jack sat cross-legged on the couch. Mary was on the floor in front of him, butcher knives lying neatly aside. Aaz already sat near her, holding a ball of purple yarn in his claws. Somewhere, somehow, Mary had found knitting needles and seemed to be making a little demon-sized scarf.

  My grandfather held a bone in his hands: the bone that was a mirror to my scar. There should have flesh clinging to its underside, but it looked clean, white—even, I thought, old. I wondered how many bodies it had been dug from over the years.

  Jack’s eyes were closed. He seemed to be meditating. If he was sleeping, I didn’t want to know what his dreams were like. Maybe Grant knew. He studied him with a particular aloofness, like there were Jack-cooties in the air, on his aura, that he didn’t want to touch.

  “Jack,” I muttered.

  My grandfather sucked in a deep breath and opened his eyes. He didn’t see me at first. He looked through me, focused on some mystery, far away.

  “Jack,” I said again.

  “My dear girl,” he replied, voice cracking. “What day is it?”

  I shared a quick look with Grant. “It’s only been thirty minutes or so since you pulled that bone out of your . . . old arm.”

  “Mmm.” He closed his eyes again, rolled his shoulders, and clutched the bone to his chest. “This may take rather longer than I thought.”

  “What are you even doing?”

  “Searching for threads.” His eye cracked open. “Despite appearances, this object is a book. Layered with . . . the patterns . . . I used as a High Lord of the Divine Organic.”

  “So it is like a seed ring.”

  “Not quite, but close enough.” Jack frowned, closing his eyes and settling deeper into the couch cushions. “Maybe you should take a walk.”

&
nbsp; “Maybe you should hurry up.”

  His mouth quirked. “My dear, I did not rush the baking of your birthday pies, and I will not be rushed in recalling the secrets of how to save the world.”

  “Seems like you would have bookmarked it,” Grant said.

  Jack’s frown deepened. I crouched beside Aaz and patted his head. He gave me a toothy grin and showed me his ball of yarn.

  “Nice,” I said. “Stay here, buddy, if you can. Keep an eye on Mary and the Old Wolf.”

  “Keep an eye on the eye,” Mary said to me, her knitting needles a blur. “Weeping blood in the sky.”

  Grant pulled me up. “Mary, we’ll be back soon.”

  The old woman smiled at him but didn’t stop knitting—not even when she focused her brittle gaze on Jack. She was still watching the old man—fingers and needles flying—when we shut the apartment door behind us.

  CHAPTER 17

  THREE months after I moved to Seattle, and three months before I met my grandfather and the trouble began, Grant and I drove north to Vancouver, Canada, to spend the weekend sightseeing. I’d been a tourist all my life but, after a certain age, had stopped enjoying the experience. One city was like any other. Always a zombie that needed exorcising. Always some wrong that needed to be righted.

  We were seated on a bench in Stanley Park when I finally asked him for the exact details of how he’d hurt his leg.

  “I walked into it,” he said, tossing bits of bread at the wandering geese. “There was a man, a schizophrenic. He’d been in and out of institutions and was violent, frighteningly so. But only to himself. He wouldn’t take medications, he wouldn’t sit long enough to talk to social workers. None of the other shelters in the city would take him. But I was cocky. I had superpowers. So I tried it my way. Except I tried too much.”

  Grant tossed out the rest of the bread and finally looked me in the eyes. “Everything I knew about manipulating energy was self-taught, instinctual, based on a lifetime of observing people and seeing how personalities matched up with . . . patterns.

  “I assumed those patterns would apply to someone with a mental illness, but they didn’t. It was more complex than that. Something I didn’t understand until I started . . . fixing things I had no business fixing. I didn’t just attempt a tweak. I went too far. I made him worse.”

  “He came after you.”

  “I was looking for him, down in the basement. Still cocky. Not believing how bad it could get. And you know all those tools we have down there.” Grant patted his leg. “He found a sledgehammer. Crushed the bone. Took his time with the blows. He kept telling me I needed to . . . stay out of his head.”

  He spoke so softly I could barely hear him. Grim, very grim.

  I touched his hand. “How did you escape?”

  “He dropped the sledgehammer and ran. I managed to drag myself to the stairs and shout for help.” Grant rubbed his knee, but it seemed more like a habitual gesture, as though he needed something to occupy his hands. “But all of that . . . the attack, the surgeries . . . that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was realizing how arrogant I’d become. It crept up on me. I didn’t even know. I hurt that man, Maxine. I hurt him because I was self- righteous, because I thought I knew best.”

  “Except that didn’t stop you.”

  “You can’t stop power. You can only control it. Choose how to use it. Choose how to use yourself.” Grant’s hand stilled against his knee. “This is what I think of every time I use my gift. I think of him. I think of his desperation. I remember to be afraid—of myself, for what I’m capable of. Sometimes you have to cross lines. Sometimes there’s a greater good that demands it. But you do so knowing that for every act, even the most inconsequential, there will be consequences. Good, or bad. Immediate, or delayed.”

  “What happened to that man?”

  “He shot himself,” Grant said. “In his note, he blamed me.”

  THE homeless shelter was so quiet. The halls smelled like smoke. We were the only ones inside.

  Made it eerie. Gave it a sense of war. A battle had happened here, I wanted to say. Soldiers cometh, enemies slain. Battered, but victorious.

  But, no. The fire was just the beginning of where it had all gone wrong.

  We made our way to the burned-out section, stopping at the edge of the fire department’s tape. Red eyes blinked on the other side. Metal groaned, followed by chewing sounds.

  The armor tingled when we drew close, its surface shimmering with a faint glow.

  “She ripped a hole in the Labyrinth to get here,” I said, studying my right hand. “Could it still be weak? Enough to just . . . fall through?

  “You’d think she would have left the same way, then, instead of taking Jack into those woods.”

  I leaned against the wall, staring at the charred shell. It had begun to rain again, and without a roof in this section, the floor around us was getting wet. So was my face. “Those people. The ones she drained. We don’t know who they are, or where she found them. She could have bonded herself to others, since then.”

  “I know,” he said, grim. “But what were we going to do? No prison here on earth can hold her. We could have killed her, but she’s been bred into slavery, brainwashed from birth. Taking her life feels wrong.”

  “Us or her, I’ll choose us.”

  “We’re not there yet.”

  We had been there since I’d first laid eyes on her, but I didn’t have the stomach for killing, either. “She’s dangerous. We need to find her. Especially if we’re going to take on the veil, and the Mahati.”

  Grant looked down, jaw tight. “You believe we can do this?”

  For the first time, I heard doubt in his voice. He’d been so fearless through all this. Strong, focused. Me, I always felt like I was falling apart. But not him.

  I tried to speak, but couldn’t. So I leaned against his back, sliding my arms around his waist—hugging him as tightly as I could. A tremor rode through him. Dek and Mal purred.

  “You’re my hero,” I said. “I believe in you.”

  He exhaled sharply, but it sounded like a laugh. “I’m a cripple with a talent for manipulating people. I don’t know what you ever saw in me.”

  I kissed his shoulder. “I was falling in love with you even before I remembered us. I saw enough.”

  Grant covered my hands. “Are we going to grow old together?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  He turned his head, enough to see me over his shoulder. “Liar.”

  I reached up and tweaked his nose. “Don’t make me be the optimist in this family.”

  “Family.” He turned in my arms, leaning hard on his cane, while his other hand slid into the back pocket of my jeans. “I like that word.”

  “Yeah?” My eyes burned, unexpectedly. “Then you think about that. We have things we need to live to see.”

  Grant sucked in his breath—held my gaze for one long, tremulous moment—then looked away, jaw tight. I stood on my toes and kissed his throat.

  “We can do this,” I breathed. “Say it. Please.”

  “We can do this,” he whispered. “We have to.”

  Mal uncoiled from my neck and slithered to Grant’s shoulders, draping over him like a snake. His little furred head rested on his ear, making himself comfortable.

  Grant frowned, reaching up to tentatively stroke Mal’s tail. A purr erupted. Dek chirped at his brother.

  I smiled and patted Grant’s chest. “You have a bodyguard.”

  He shook his head. “You need Mal.”

  “Grant,” I said, my smile slipping just a little. “Who’s going to hurt me?”

  His gaze turned severe. “Maxine—”

  I didn’t give him a chance to finish. I grabbed his shirt, clenched my right hand into a fist, and thought hard about the Messenger.

  The homeless shelter shattered into the void.

  And inside the void, as I hung there, lost, the darkness stirred within me, opening its eye to stare.

 
; You are frightened here, it said softly. You do not like the dark.

  Go back to sleep, I replied. I don’t want you.

  You need us. Just as the Reapers needed us.

  No, I said, but only to myself.

  Because I did need it. Something, anyway, more than what I had.

  Grant and I stepped from the void into an inferno of red rock and golden sand.

  Sun white-hot, blinding. Cloudless sky. We stood on a high plateau. Beneath us, more sand and rock, and the outline of a faint road that led in a straight line toward a horizon ridged with yet more plateaus and jagged stone mounds.

  It didn’t matter much to me where we were. It was day in this part of the world—night in Seattle—assuming we hadn’t traveled through time. The boys were heavy on my skin, heavy everywhere, even on my head. I wished that Jack and Mary—and Byron—still had Aaz watching over them.

  Grant shielded his eyes against the sun, squinting at me.

  “Love the art,” he said, as Dek adjusted his tattooed tail across my cheeks and brow, little claws resting over my eyelids. I turned in a slow circle, searching for the Messenger.

  Grant stopped in the middle of pulling off his jacket. “I see something. Other side of the rocks. Energy rising up, like a heat wave.”

  “What does that look like?”

  “Muted,” he said, tying his coat around his waist and picking up his cane. “She burns at a half-light, as though everything vibrant inside her was drained out.”

  “You must appear different than what she’s used to.”

  “It’s probably unsettling.” He didn’t say anything else and seemed troubled. I didn’t like this any better than he did.

  It didn’t get easier when I saw her.

  We found the Messenger on the other side of the rock mound, sitting cross-legged in the burning sand as she stared off the cliff at the distant desert plain. Her hands were clasped, her back straight. We weren’t quiet in our approach, but she did not look at us, or move. Not until we were almost on top of her.

  “You,” she said, with a surprising note of weariness in her voice. Weariness, and disappointment, and anger.