by Stark, Jenn
“You did not just quote The Incredibles,” I broke in as the earth began spinning on its axis again and I recovered my snark.
Miranda shrugged one shoulder, as coy as a teenager at her first dance. “There’s more truth in our fairy tales than we ever would dare to admit to ourselves. But just as that holds true, so too does this: if those who are special act like they are not special, eventually they will become not special. And that’s as great tragedy as anything in this world, wouldn’t you say?”
Once again, the woman had a point, but Death regarded her with flat disapproval. “Are you done yet, Bartholomew?”
My eyes popped wide. If I’d had a teacup in my hand, I would have dropped it. Instead, I had to settle for my jaw falling open.
“Bartholomew?” I gasped, my gaze going from an offended-looking Miranda back to Death. “Bartholomew Simms?”
“Hush, hush, hush!” Miranda/Bartholomew hissed, flapping her hands. “The girl is coming!”
“Mistress Miranda?”
Lily the cashier stepped out into the courtyard, Simon right behind her, and the combined intense focus she drew from all of us was apparently too much for her body to handle. Lily’s skin suddenly started to glow, a rosy hue billowing out from her a good three feet. She lifted up her hands, issuing a startled “Oh!”
Miranda/Bartholomew groaned. “Ah, for the love of the saints, look what you’ve done, Lily. I knew I’d kept you on too long. Back into the shop with you.”
“But…what’s happening to me?” the cashier asked, staring at her glowing fingers.
I caught Simon’s eye, and he nodded. “It’s okay, you’ll get used to it,” he said, ushering Lily back inside the building.
“Always the same damned problem,” Miranda/Bartholomew said, her Irish brogue thick with dismay. “If they stay here too long, I can’t seem to keep them from blossoming where they’re planted.”
Death smirked. “I thought you were the one who thought everyone should be special.”
“It’s different when they’ve no blessed idea what they’re in for,” Miranda/Bartholomew snapped back. “I try to recruit the magic curious, not a nascent Connected. But they all become Connected in time.”
“Let’s all back up a second,” I interjected, barely able to keep from spluttering. “You—you’re Bartholomew Simms. As in the Bartholomew Simms who was Temperance of the Arcana Council for, like, five hundred years, up through the 1850s. You knew Abigail Strand.”
Miranda/Bartholomew stopped her hand-flapping and sighed. “I am,” she said, executing a short bow. “I did. Abigail…shouldn’t have died so young, and that’s the truth. When she did, I found I just couldn’t stand to remain on the Council any longer. And I knew a little about the In Between. Specifically, I knew the Magician couldn’t travel parts of it, especially those bits that extended over Ireland. It wasn’t so difficult to slip in and…well, not slip out again. I suspected Death knew, of course. But I used my time well, I well and truly did.”
She pointed a heavily ringed finger at Death. “And I’m Temperance, after all. I found the things that were hidden in the In Between, hidden away for millennia, in some cases, so well, even you couldn’t find it. Like an ancient, powerful harp that humans were too god-struck to destroy, despite your haughty demands. And it looks like you’ll be needing that harp now, won’t you? So I helped.”
“You meddled,” Death countered. “Totally different.”
“Only to you. I did what needed to be done. I took on another identity, and then another, and eventually, well—” She fluttered her hand at the garden. “Here I am. With workers who can’t seem to help but bloom into Connecteds despite my best efforts to keep them safe.”
“I’m not sure how much you can help anyone keep from growing when they’re meant to grow,” I put in. I was familiar enough with contact-high Connectedness, so Lily’s transformation didn’t surprise me. “Like it or not, we’re in a brave new world here.”
“You should talk,” Miranda sniped. “You went toe to toe with Seamus and his spectral opposition warriors, but you didn’t raise a hand to stop them—or to help them. You simply walked away.”
I blinked. First Niall with his dig about the Hallowed Knight, and now Miranda? Did everyone on this island know my business? “Why should I stop them? They’re entitled to their beliefs.”
“Not when their beliefs are wrong,” sniffed Miranda/Bartholomew, every inch the stubborn Irishwoman. In this incarnation, I decided, it was simply easier to think of her as Miranda. I’d have to open the box of Bartholomew crazy sometime soon, I knew. But not today.
Today, I merely needed to shut down her judginess. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re an advocate for the Neo-Celts and free expression of magical abilities, and that’s great. But what about the beliefs of the spectral opposition warriors? Should they be repressed just because they don’t want to be attacked by those who wield magic?”
“You wield magic,” Miranda protested. “And you’re on their side?”
“Nope, I’m on the side of people not killing each other while they work out how to coexist. Once you start appointing who’s right and who’s wrong, it leads to a very slippery slope.”
“I disagree,” Miranda said, folding her arms over her chest. “The forces allied against magic have had their time for all these millennia. Why shouldn’t it be the time of magic?”
Death took this one. “Because, Temperance, any power in the wrong hands is too much power. And by definition, hands that would seek to oppress or overcome by force are the wrong hands. That kind of power given too much sway is dangerous.”
“Dangerous to whom?” Miranda countered. I had to hand it to her, she had plenty of starch in her skirts.
“Dangerous to this precious, fragile planet and the precious, fragile beings who live upon it. Magic is not a static force. It grows when it is used.” Death turned her gaze upon me, her pale eyes suddenly fierce. “You know this to be true too. You’ve used your magic more actively of late, no doubt assuming that you’ll eventually reach the limits of your power. But you haven’t. You won’t.”
I lifted a brow, unnerved by her focus on me. “Everybody reaches the limits of their power eventually.”
“In this case, Justice, you’re wrong,” Death said. “The body is a physical construct, while magic is a metaphysical construct. The body has limits. Magic does not have limits. It can stretch your sinews and break your bones, overtax your heart and explode your blood vessels, and yes, it can kill you. Because your vessel defines your limits. But if you learn how to transcend the vessel, there is no limit. Eventually someone is going to figure that out. Might as well be you.”
“Oh, great,” I muttered. “I’m back to Jean Gray, eater of worlds.”
“Or maybe just Sara Wilde, stubborn—” Death broke off abruptly as a dark shadow passed over her face. When she spoke again, her eyes were troubled.
“Blue?” I whispered as my gut clenched. I didn’t know the name Miranda had called her, and I rarely used Death’s current name. But now I stared at her in quickly mounting fear.
“Nikki is failing,” she said without preamble.
All the blood left my head in a rush, leaving me swaying on my feet. “What? Armaeus said she was fine.”
“She was fine, but she’s not anymore. She’s gone into a coma, and she’s sinking fast. You’ve got to go to her.”
I could already feel my body starting to destabilize, flame licking along my skin. “Yes. Yes, of course. She’s with Sells?”
“Not to her body, Sara,” Death snapped. “She’s already slipping away from that.”
“But how…” My arm suddenly flared. I knew how to reach Nikki, Death had seen to that a long time ago, but that wasn’t my only problem. “But how can I help her heal? I tried once. I failed.”
“And you’ll fail again if, as Miranda says, you don’t believe.” Death pointed at my pocket. “You’ve got all you need right there.”
I shoved my hand in
to my pocket and pulled out the jar of dirt. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
But Miranda had her hands up to her cheeks, her eyes wide. “The soil of Fermanagh,” she breathed. “Do you know what that is—what you have? Though I don’t know how you came by it. Since all the publicity, they’re treating that sacred earth like the crown jewels.”
I stared down at the small jar, my heart pounding with panic. “It’s dirt.”
“No, sweet Justice Wilde,” Miranda said, her smile a little sad. “It’s magic.”
“You don’t have time to argue, Sara.” Death’s voice cracked between us. “Go. Now.”
“You have got to be kidding me!” I wailed, wrapping my hand around the jar as flames burst around me.
I went.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Despite Death’s admonition, I fully expected to arrive at Nikki’s hospital room once I focused on the tattoo that Death had inked on me months earlier, the design crafted to ensure I’d be able to find my best friend no matter where she went or what befell her.
Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way.
In fact, there was no building, no hospital bed, and nobody in sight. Instead, I was lost in a tumbling murk of gray mist, thick and unguent and intrusive. It slapped and poked at me, brushing up against me like a living thing, chittering and moaning. It was a living thing, I decided, or at least there were living things in it. I shoved the jar of dirt into my pocket, then snapped my fingers out, but my hands emitted only the barest crackle, like they had deep in the catacombs beneath Trinity College. I flickered my third eye open, and saw—exactly nothing.
“Nikki,” I shouted, and was rewarded with a panicked gasp to my right. With no other option, I blundered forward, slipping over the wet rock surface—what I hoped was a rock surface anyway—my hands flailing as I tried to make sense of my surroundings. “Nikki?”
“Doll—” Nikki’s familiar sobriquet was cut off beneath the sudden stamping of many tiny feet that rushed past me into the gloom. I got the impression of short, long-armed bodies covered in fur, like chimps on a rampage, then they were gone. A second later, though, Nikki gave a startled, agonized yelp of pain, and I jerked at the desperation in it. This was someone desperately trying not to make any noise at all, but she couldn’t help herself, because she’d been hurt.
Something inside me snapped. “Fuck this.”
All of Death’s words came back to me, Death’s and the other Council Members’ as well, Miranda’s, even the chiding disapproval of a brilliant human sensei who’d tried and failed to get me to connect to my inner Connected power—so many words, so many ways to access that which lurked deep within me, a jack-in-the-box of ability ready and waiting to spring out. I’d never tried to turn that crank too hard, though. I’d always been scrambling to catch up to the powers I already had, with no desire to add to the mix of crazy. But now I ignored the lever completely and reached out for the box of my magic in blind rage, wrenching off its top with a roar of fear and pain.
My hands lit up with fire all the way to my elbows, and more flame gushed out my back, soaring up in arcs of light that spread like wings behind me, knifing through the shroud of gloom and chasing it back.
And with the added light, I saw Nikki. And the things that were feasting on her.
I raced forward with the speed of teleportation, though I could feel my feet moving to eat up the twenty yards that separated me from Nikki. The short, squat imps of the In Between caught wind of their imminent destruction a nanosecond too late. I swept them off Nikki’s body, blasting them into nothingness as Nikki flinched away from the swath of blue fire.
Then I fell to my knees, dousing the flames that burned along my arms but not the arching barrier behind me.
“Nikki!” I gasped again.
She turned to me with a blighted face. If she wasn’t my best friend in any world, I would have flinched away. I wanted to flinch away. Her beautiful strong features had been ruined—eyes gouged out, mouth sliced away on one side, as if she’d been caught by an errant claw.
“Dollface.” Her words were only slightly slurred.
I rammed my third eye open, pain exploding at my temples. Nikki’s energy circuits were overloaded to a white-hot degree, and I realized her eyes hadn’t been gouged out, they’d been burnt in their sockets. A seer who’d seen too much.
“Nikki, my God.” Instinctively, I lifted my hands to her, feeling my energy scorching me from the inside out as well. It seemed incongruous to add fire to what was already burnt, though. “What do I need to do?”
“Just touch me, dollface,” Nikki whimpered, her soft voice bringing a rush of tears to my eyes for no good goddamned reason. Then her mouth worked, and her next words were broken, agonized. “I want to be held again.”
My heart shattering, I moved my hands forward and then, a heartbeat later, I remembered the jar of soil. I twisted away, plunging my hand in my pocket as Nikki tried not to sob, and pulled the jar free. Not knowing what else to do, I poured the soft, wet loam over my palms and pressed it into my skin, coating it with a thick black layer. Then I turned back to Nikki.
Without hesitating further, I placed my palms on her face, not knowing what this new magic coiled inside me would do when it broke free, but praying to whatever pantheons who would hear me to guide this precious flame and dirt and magic to its highest purpose—
Crimson light exploded from my hands. Not the blue light I was used to, but the urgent, vital color of life’s blood. It set the soft earth of Ireland aglow, and it flowed over Nikki’s face, sealing it, penetrating it, pouring into her. Where my healing fire in the past had traced circuitries of energy, rekindling that which had been frayed, broken, or burnt away, this fire was more like a molten tide, cascading in a full wash of healing—bone and sinew, thought and mind, heart and emotion. Nikki’s body didn’t jerk with the agony of being jammed back together again, she simply collapsed in full surrender, going boneless in the little crack of rock into which she’d wedged herself, which had left only her face and torso exposed, her legs protected so she could run back to the light when it appeared again.
So she could run…
How did I know that?
I tried to grab at that tiny thread of awareness, but Nikki’s face began contorting again, shimmering in front of me, and I ripped my hands away, the crust of soil coming with me like peeling a sheet off a sleeping person. Only this person was wide awake and staring now, her eyes returned to their full, startled glory.
“Sara,” she whispered, bringing her hands to her face, her mouth, gently probing her eyes. “You came.”
My arm flared with cold heat where Death had inked me, deep and true, and I didn’t need to glance down to see the crisscrossing blue coils of Celtic artwork, symbolizing the eternal path back to Nikki, wherever she might find herself. “I came.”
She blinked several times, as if trying to fully understand what she was seeing. “So what the hell is that on your back?”
I stumbled back away from her then, getting my own bearings. We were in a large, irregularly sized room, ancient in its angles and worn rock. The fissure where Nikki had shoved herself appeared to be part of a series of passages that roamed off into nowhere, and some, I realized, that disappeared into darkness where gloom and danger lurked, out of the range of my fiery…wings, for lack of a better word.
“Where are we?” I demanded. “How do you feel?” At this point, I didn’t know which question was more important, so I was okay with whatever she answered, but as Nikki braced her hands on either side of the crevice and pushed herself forward, there was no hesitation, no wince of pain.
“Well, I feel a damned sight better than I did a short while ago.” She placed a trembling hand on her chest. “Ticker is beating normally again too. There was a bad stretch when it seemed like it was going to pound right out of my chest. I figured it was some sort of adrenaline reaction, but I couldn’t get my Zen on with my eyeballs burned out.”
&nbs
p; I reached out a hand, making sure it didn’t glow with any sort of fire before I did so, and she took it, her grip certain and strong. I pulled her out of the crevice and realized she was wearing a hospital gown. Sort of.
“That’s what Dr. Sells allowed you to wear in her ICU?”
Nikki half smiled with a trace of her old energy, glancing down to the custom-made mini shift of light blue cotton, the neckline a deep V and the waist bound in a surplice style—easily undone with a quick tug, but not a shapeless muumuu. “Dr. Sells didn’t have much of a choice when I hyperventilated at her sartorial options. But we managed well enough until I…” She frowned, looking around. “I don’t actually know how I got here, you want to know the truth. I was doing fine. All my vitals were registering, there was no sign of the toxin, I’d recovered my ability to read memories—handier than hell in a hospital, I will tell you that, at least if you can get the person to focus on what you want to know.”
“Yeah, I suspect any of those nurses or docs have a dozen different cases running in their minds at all times, only one of which is you.”
“I wasn’t the problem they were flipping out over, though,” Nikki said, narrowing her eyes at the memory. “You were.”
“Really?” I shifted back as she came forward, careful not to singe her with my wings. “I recovered more quickly from whatever hurt us, though.”
“You did, but that’s not what I mean. What I got from the lab weenies who were tapping my bloodstream like a champagne fountain on New Year’s Eve was that the formulation of the poison had a target, and that target was Nikki Dawes. You were only supposed to be the carrier. For you to have been so damaged makes them think we have some sort of weird connection between us, and they’re all atwitter about it.”
“We do have a connection.” The fact that Nikki had gotten poisoned because she was with me made me feel far worse than the fact that someone out there had enough of my DNA that they could formulate the toxin specifically for me. Still, it wasn’t completely unreasonable. I’d spilled enough blood over the course of the past decade that someone paying attention could easily have taken advantage of it. And it wasn’t the main issue now.
