Seraphs

by Faith Hunter

  “There’s no pain,” I lied. I had thought myself healed, but I could use the old wound as a weapon. Feigning injury with a gasp, I dropped flat and separated my weapons as if in surrender. He reacted; a minuscule hesitation, a millisecond delay. I brought up both bamboo staves, the practice weapons nonlethal, rounded, and blunt. Crossing them at the tips, I hit him just below his breastbone—a lethal strike had I wished. Even using the bamboo rods, the move was capable of rupturing the descending aorta.

  The staves indented his chest, the tips shoving up under his ribs. Air whooshed from his lungs in a pained grunt. His knees buckled. Mage-fast, I whipped from beneath him and watched him fall, tumbling in an avalanche of joints and long bones and torso to the floor. And I heard myself laugh. “Die, mule,” I said, insulting.

  Audric looked up from the floor, his dark eyes meeting mine in horror. He splayed a hand over the spot where I’d struck him, fingers clenching. The bright glow of a deep bruise emanated from between his fingers. Fear snatched my breath. How hard had I hit him? Shock, sorrow, heartache, and disbelief bled from his eyes. Little mage, what have you done? I am done for, he seemed to say. Horrified, I fell to my knees. Audric bellowed, and lunged. “Gotcha!”

  “Saints’ balls,” I cursed hoarsely, trying to block his practice staves from taking my heart. But the bamboo tips hit my chest, one digging in hard just below my sternum, the other below my left breast. The breath left my lungs. He rose from the floor and held me down, foot on my throat. I was finished.

  “Never feel for the enemy,” Audric said, a lesson from Battle Mage 101. “Never! And stop cursing. Your Darkness might hear you and come back to visit.” His staves clacked together sharply. “Now get up. Try to do it right this time.”

  Mages have better night vision than humans, a better sense of smell, and are faster. But our musculature and skeletal frames are lighter, more brittle, and mock battle with a stronger opponent tires us fast. In Enclave—the gilded prisons where my kind are kept, separated from humans who hate us—such tiring helps control mage-heat, an out-of-control sexual arousal when in the presence of seraphs. In Enclave, almost everyone dances and practices the savage arts just as Audric forced me to. I knew that, if I refused, I’d end up with broken bones. Easier to give in.

  An hour later, I was exhausted, sweating, my scarlet hair sticking in oily strands, my dobok damp and chilly, even with the temperature rising in the loft. I had bruises on my bruises and my right ankle was sore where I had twisted it, trying to replicate a move he’d shown me, an advanced horse, rising, walking, and prancing in a half circle all at once. When he had me thoroughly whipped, he let me rest. Well, sort of. He sat me at the kitchen table with a strong cup of tea and gave me a pop quiz on the history of the swan, and of the neomage who had created the flashy move.

  In the midst of the testing, he questioned me again about the weak place on my side. I tried to sidestep the answer with humor, but he refused to rise to the bait, straddling a chair across from me, face serene but determined.

  Finally, elbows on the table, hands clasped in front of me on the papers, I said, “I nearly died on the Trine, sitting in a conjuring circle, scrying beneath the ground into the hellhole of Darkness. I was spying, okay?” Trying to find Lucas . . . trying to see what was down there.

  “Thorn,” he sighed.

  “I know. It was stupid,” I said, watching my scarred fingers flex. “And I don’t really even know if everything I saw in the vision was real. But I got trapped in this reddish stuff, some kind of conjure, an enormous structure deep underground. And this”—I paused, not knowing what to call it—“this thing—half insect, half reptile—speared me with a claw or a barb.” I touched my side, feeling the invisible bruise. “It wasn’t real. It was all in my mind. But it felt real.” It still feels real.

  I didn’t mention the creature I had found down there, the being called Mistress Amethyst, trapped in the structure. I didn’t add that a seraph of the Most High had gone down there and hadn’t come back out. I didn’t know why I kept that part to myself, but I had. I also didn’t add that I hadn’t been able to get free from the trap by myself, and that if I hadn’t had help from the surface, I would have suffocated in the midst of an incantation I hadn’t been ready to try and should never have attempted alone. I had been lucky. Very lucky. And Audric didn’t believe in luck.

  My self-appointed teacher, his deep brown eyes trying to pierce the secrets I still held close, pointed to the Book of Workings on my shelf. “Study that. Learn what you did wrong. Then we’ll talk about it. You missed proper training when you left Enclave. I will see you appropriately educated in all the mage arts.”

  At eight o’clock, he clicked his bamboo staves together and left, pausing once in the open door of the loft, a cold breeze blowing in from the stairwell. “You must strengthen your wards and find out why these are suddenly so ineffective.”

  “Gee, Audric, what a bright idea. Wonder why I didn’t think of that?” I was feeling snarky.

  He closed the door. I took two more ibuprofen and ate a breakfast of oatmeal, raisins, and almonds while soaking in a hot bath atop healing amulets on the porcelain tub’s bottom. Underneath the neomage glow, I was a mass of welts, bruises, and new scars that crisscrossed and lumped over my older scars. I wasn’t real pretty to look at, but then, if I didn’t count the incubus who came by from time to time, I hadn’t had a suitor, lover, or boyfriend in months, no one to see me naked. Audric didn’t count. His preferences lay elsewhere.

  I dropped a last healing amulet into the water, and let it settle in the bottom of the old tub behind my back. It worked its conjure as I sipped my tea. The water in tea and bath was springwater, drawn from the conjured, shielded, and booby-trapped spring behind the shop. With the amulet, they would take most of the pain and a lot of the blood out of the bruises, making it easier to glamour them. The newer scars were harder to hide; they glowed hotter than the older ones, especially the ones on my left hand. I made a fist, testing the flexibility of the fingers and the ugly, ridged scars that pulled against tendons and bones. In mage-sight, the scars were a solid white glow across my hand. Even with a double dose of a glamour, there was still a muted radiance.

  Not that I had to conceal what I was. Everyone in Mineral City now knew I was a mage, and that I had been in hiding among them for more than ten years. A lot of the townspeople didn’t want me here, so I was keeping a low profile. No mage-clothes, no practicing savage-chi or savage-blade in the streets, no glowing, and certainly no display of my scars to remind them of the battle I had fought, the battle that had kept them safe for the last few weeks. There was nothing like demonstrating that people were beholden to you to make them hate you.

  At nine, I braided my hair, dressed in beige overleggings and a tunic with boots, hid my amulets, and glamoured my skin down to the dullness of human flesh. The mirrors assured me I looked human, if not beautiful. The scars on my face resisted even my best conjures. Before leaving the apartment, I checked the messages, the red blinking light reminding me that a call had come through near dawn, just after Audric woke me with swordplay. No message, just the sound of breathing and a faint click as the caller hung up. Not a threat; not really anything. But there had been a lot of such calls recently. I figured it was disgruntled members of the orthodox, or maybe Jane Hilton, my ex-husband’s alleged new wife. But I didn’t know, and until someone made Caller ID technology cheap enough for the average investor, I had no way to find out. Like many such devices, the technology was available, but expensive since the end of the world.

  I put back my shoulders, set aside my disquiet, and went to open Thorn’s Gems, the jewelry and lapidary shop I owned with my two best friends. I would wear red brecciated jasper today to contrast with the brighter scarlet of my hair. And maybe today the townspeople would stop treating me like I had brought them a plague.

  Chapter 2

  Downstairs, I lit the gas logs to warm the shop, and opened the safe. By the time Audric and
Rupert joined me, the dregs of an argument lingering in the air, display cases were filled with our wares, coffee was brewing, and water for tea was simmering. Rupert was close-mouthed, lips tight with denial. I knew what it meant. He was always like this when it was time for Audric to head back to work. Arguments always ruined their last few days together.

  Audric was a dead-miner with a claim on the entire town of Sugar Grove. He had been in Mineral City, in the Appalachian Mountains, to sell his latest finds, visit among the humans he loved, and resupply. Now he had to go back to work. In late February, in a mini-ice age, work meant a grueling three- or four-day journey to his claim through snow-covered mountain trails, Then months of work uncovering more of the gold, silver, junkyards, china and crystal, and other treasures that had survived the town’s destruction and abandonment.

  Unless he sold the claim to a rich prospector or a big company that specialized in dead-mining, it would be months before he returned. There had been offers for the claim, which made this leave-taking even more bittersweet. I wanted to add my voice to Rupert’s and beg Audric to stay. When he left, I’d be the only supernat for a hundred miles. Maybe more. But I knew better than to ask him to give up his claim. Few dead-miners ever located an entire town. Audric was famous for his discovery. The big half-breed had pride: pride in his find, pride in his claim, pride in his mining skills, pride in his fighting abilities. If he stuck around, he’d be less independent, and Audric could never countenance that. He had to make a fortune and a name for himself.

  As they argued, covering ground they had scoured clean a hundred times before, I laid out a selection of emerald pieces, the stones extracted from the nearby hills. Mineral City was known all over the US for the quartz and feldspar dug from cliffs and scraped from strip mines. The two common minerals provided financial success for the town, but its gems were spectacular, calling to the speculator and the individual prospector, and the latest claims were making us famous for gemstones. The emeralds had been sold to Thorn’s Gems by a local miner, and the deep green of the stones was spectacular. I had made a chunky necklace out of some B-grade portions, and added a faceted focal stone. The necklace was too pricey to interest the locals, but I’d listed it on the store’s Web site. I was hoping for a quick sale at the asking price. Two comparable pieces had been sent to retail stores that showcased our jewelry in Atlanta and Mobile. Stores all over the country hoped to carry our designs, and we had to decide if we wanted to expand the line to satisfy the current demand, or stay exclusive. Expanding meant we needed to hire help or take in a new partner. Like Audric, who could buy in if he really wanted to. Which made these arguments even more difficult.

  I was a lapidary, meaning I worked with raw stone, turning it into unique jewelry, statues, vases, and, now that I had been revealed as a mage, into amulets and charms for the customers who wanted them. Not all did. The sale of conjured items was a sore spot with some orthodox practitioners, both locally and out of state.

  I set our pricey items in the center display case. The top glass was damaged, making it hard to see some of the merchandise, but the blemished site was probably the only reason Thorn’s Gems hadn’t been broken into, vandalized, and ransacked by a mob of the local extremists. Even in a town as small as Mineral City, there were plenty of those around. The flaw was a four-inch circle, created when a seraph, an angel of punishment, had dropped by to visit me—well, to judge me—and had removed his sigil of office, placing it on the display case. The antique, Pre-Ap glass had crazed and heated almost to the melting point under the powerful amulet, leaving the top permanently etched with a symbol of the Most High—the ring and its firelike lettering of the word Adonai. I polished the defect with a cloth.

  If I had been taken away that day by the seraph, whose name was still unknown to us, there probably wouldn’t have been two bricks still standing for my partners to divide. Now, I figured only the burned, cracked, partially melted ring of glass kept us safe. It was a reminder to the townspeople that I had permission from the High Host to be here. Lucky me.

  I had hidden in plain sight, disguised as a human, for ten years, a blatant violation of the edicts set up by the High Host of the Seraphim. Any other mage would have been carted back to Enclave in disgrace or turned over to humans for judgment. For me, either punishment would have meant certain death, though the human execution would have been more bloody and violent than the mage-death. But I had been given permission to stay on in Mineral City. The reprieve was a two-edged sword. The townspeople treated me like I was a rogue tiger. Interesting, maybe even mesmerizing, but not something you wanted living next door.

  I arranged the emeralds as my friends bickered and the townspeople strolled back from sunrise kirk services, many peering into the shop in curiosity, many more turning their heads away, as if the sight of me might contaminate them. It wasn’t as if I flaunted being a neomage. I kept my skin blanked to human dullness and I dressed in human clothes, never displaying my amulets or weapons. With the exception of a few new scars, I didn’t look any different from before the seraph had outed me, but now I sometimes felt like I had the words “Whore witchy-woman” tattooed on my forehead.

  An elderly woman dressed in unrelieved orthodox black, from her dress to her boots and heavy overcoat, paused at the front window and deliberately turned to stare into the shop. When she caught my eye, I paused, holding a stunning turquoise necklace with silver beads that dangled. The woman lifted her hands and made a version of devil horns at me, thumbs and little fingers pointed up, the others folded under. The symbol had once meant other things. Now it was the sign of evil. My friends fell silent. Outside, the passersby seemed to stop, all watching. It was the most blatant reaction to me since the day the seraph had come. Up the street, two others dressed in orthodox black paused and gaped, their eyes gleaming, faces arrested in midconversation. My face flamed. The beads in my hands clattered.

  A little farther, an elder also watched, his brown robes blowing in the frozen wind. Elder Jasper halted, his Bible in one hand, his crucifix dangling. Jasper, who had once been my friend. The elder looked censorious, not of me, but of the old woman.

  The hateful woman dropped her hands and moved on, her boots crunching the frozen snow. Sleet wisped against the building and onto my porch over the front walk. The townspeople moved on, some clearly embarrassed, others openly gleeful. The hatred was now out in the open. On some level, I knew that things would change now. And they wouldn’t be getting better.

  Jacey, my other best friend, opened the door, the bells jingling cheerfully. Storming inside, she threw her walking stick into the umbrella stand and her cape over the coatrack all in one motion. The walking stick clattered. The coatrack wobbled. “Did you see her? The old bat. You just let Old Lady Vestis come by the shop again on a Monday when we’re closed, needing a favor, a last-minute gift. That’s the last time—” Jacey looked at me, standing unmoving behind the counter, still holding the turquoise necklace, and stopped speaking. She pointed a finger at me.

  “You will not let that old harpy make you feel bad. You will not!” When I couldn’t manage a smile, Jacey stomped over and took the necklace, setting it on the countertop with a clank. Then she bent and hugged me tight, hard, turning my face to her shoulder, before she pushed me away and shook me like she might one of her many children and stepchildren. “You will not feel bad about her. She’s only one of a few—a very few—who feel that way. Most people are excited at the thought of having a neomage living in town.” She shook me again. “How many people have come to the shop for a charm? Or a special amulet? Lots!”

  “After hours,” I said. “Sneaking around, ashamed. People I’ve known since I came here, went to school with; people I liked.” I remembered the faces, the shock, at the sight of the old woman. A sudden realization hit me. “Or they’re afraid of me.” I looked up at Jacey’s brown eyes and mussed brown hair, bangs tangled by the wind. “That’s it, isn’t it? They’re all afraid.”

  “Not of you,”
Rupert said softly from behind me. “Of the orthodox.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked. I tried to jerk away, but Jacey held me firm, her strong hands gripping my shoulders, human muscle mass winning out against mage swiftness. “You promised you’d tell me if there was trouble starting.”

  “There’s been talk. A little,” Jacey said. “But you know we’re standing up for you.”

  “Talk? About what? Strangulation? Drawing and quartering? Hot pincers and knives? Stones and blood. I’ve put all of you in danger, haven’t I?”

  To the left of the shop windows, the front door opened again, bells jaunty. A cold wind skittered across the floor. We all turned. Elder Jasper stood in the opening, his face harsh, the crucifix dangling against his robes of office. His Bible was tight in his hands, his knuckles white against the dark leather. I knew he hadn’t heard me curse—he’d still been outside—but I clamped my mouth shut in fear. Slowly, deliberately, he stepped inside.

  Just as deliberately, Rupert, Audric, and Jacey flanked me. Audric slid one hand into his sleeve. Jasper’s eyes tracked the movements and his forward motion halted. To the side, the gas flames flogged the fake logs in a jittery, hungry rhythm. Outside, sleet shushed down, the sound cutting off the rest of the world. Audric pivoted, clearing his target line. Violence wavered in the air between the elder and us. Tension constricted my throat. Faster than their eyes could track, I slipped to the side, around the display case, and up to Jasper.

  “Thorn’s Gems is honored to receive the kirk elder,” I said, placing myself between Audric and Jasper.

  Jasper’s eyes widened, then tightened at my blatant use of mage-speed. His gaze moved from my face to the three beyond, taking in their taut postures, the locations of Audric’s hands, the anger on the faces of my friends. Gently, he closed the door, so carefully that the bells didn’t chime. “My blessing on your house,” he said, the formal words an elder spoke when he came calling. But then he added, “And may you find absolution and forgiveness in the countenance of the Most High.” Not casual words, but words of mercy, words uttered before judgment, when one has been called to trial for a crime worthy of punishment or death. Seraph stones. I was being called before the kirk.