by Ella M. Lee
When I arrived inside, the sanctum was in pandemonium. I stumbled to my knees, knocked over by hurricane-force winds. Cold, harsh rain buffeted my face, the tall grass whipping against me violently. My loose hair slapped into me, and I dragged it out of my eyes. The black sky was heavy with clouds and lit with lightning. I could barely see more than a few feet in front of me, the ocean merely a brutal rush of sound in my ears.
What the hell?
“Daniel?” I called, but my voice was immediately lost to the wind.
I got to my feet, soaked and filthy, making my way footfall by footfall toward the safety of the mountains, where there were caves and overhangs.
“Dan!” I shouted over and over as I went.
When I finally made it, pressing myself against the rock in relief and clearing water from my eyes, I heard Dan’s voice behind me.
“Fi! Fi!”
“Dan,” I called. I peered farther into the small cave. “I’m out here!”
Dan emerged from the darkness, frantic, his hair a mess, his eyes wild, holding up a hand to protect his face from the wind and rain.
“What’s going on?” he practically shouted, his gaze darting around in fear.
“No idea,” I said. “How long has it been like this?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just got here. I don’t…” His voice trailed off uncertainly, nervous. “None of this feels right to me.”
I beckoned him closer, only to find he was trembling and sweating. Batting my hair out of my face again, I drew him into a hug.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s fine. Calm down.”
I had no idea what was wrong with him; Daniel almost never panicked. Hell, we’d created this place and he’d died for it, all without a single ounce of panic. That he was panicked now shot me through with anxiety. I smothered it as best I could—it wouldn’t help the magic for me to agitate it with my own emotions.
“Sit,” I said, tucking us into the shelter of the cave. “We can figure this out.” I took his hands as he sat across from me. “Breathe. You’re turning into me—a bundle of nerves!”
He laughed shakily, but after a few breaths, he seemed calmer.
“I think the sanctum affects my emotions,” he said.
“Seems like it,” I said. I brushed my hand across Dan’s hair. “I’m not used to you being such a wreck. Remember when you barged into a house full of Meteor magicians to rescue Nicolas? Fearless. Don’t let this little old sanctum bother you.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” His eyes had calmed, the lids no longer pinched, the gleam in them no longer frantic. His shoulders relaxed. “Look. The rain is clearing.”
I leaned around the entrance of the cave. The wind still hit me like a slap, but the rain was light, and the clouds had dulled back to a mild gray.
The two of us sat silently for a while longer, listening as the wind faded and the crashing of the distant ocean settled.
“Looks like the storm is gone,” I said uneasily.
“That was weird,” Dan said.
“Everything is weird right now,” I said with a sigh. “I should get back. The others are worried. The alarm wards all went off at once, and it’s the middle of the night.”
Dan nodded, this time not sullen or sad. He cared too much about our family to let his own emotions get in the way of me returning to them. “Go, Fi.”
I was back in the temple before he’d even let go of my hands.
I knew immediately that whatever had happened was over. The alarms were deactivated. The sanctum was back to its dim glow and mild churning. Nicolas sat at my side, but the others seemed to have gone back to the soubou.
“What did you find?” Nicolas asked, steadying me.
“There was a storm inside the sanctum. A literal storm. Wind. Rain.” I shook my head. “Daniel was frantic, completely panicked like I’ve never seen him.”
“He was concerned about the storm?” Nicolas asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so?” I offered. “I think it was more like he was upset because the sanctum was upset. Like the two things were connected, rather than one following the other, if that makes sense.”
Nicolas cast his eyes upward in thought, running a hand through his messy hair. When his eyes finally landed back on me, he sighed. “I don’t think this is any good at all.”
Chapter 10
Every gaze in the room darkened at Nicolas’s hasty explanation of why the alarm wards had gone off. None of us liked the implication of his words.
“You think Daniel’s presence is destabilizing the sanctum,” Ryan said, boiling down Nicolas’s several paragraphs of technical lingo to a single thought.
“To put it simply, as you’ve done, yes,” Nicolas said. “This means good news and bad news.”
“Bad news first, please,” Keisha said, her chin in her hands, blinking sleepily at Nicolas.
“I should think that’s obvious,” he said. “Our sanctum could become so unstable and erratic that it breaks, or implodes, or affects our magic. So far, we’ve seen several instances of this, some worse than others. Our protective shield shattering, the first time Fiona went into the sanctum, tonight… not to mention the other small oddities we’ve encountered in our work. We’ve been treating them as separate issues, but what if they aren’t? What if they are dangerously connected? We cannot ignore the severity of tonight.”
Ryan cleared his throat. “Nicolas is correct—we have all experienced small disturbances. Things we previously ignored because we thought we were doing something wrong. Now, we can’t be sure.”
I nodded, as did Irina, Athena, and Teng. We’d all noticed anomalies: the shattered storm orbs, the fizzles in our magic, the way shields and wards occasionally unwound themselves, the sometimes-blatant disobedience.
“Okay, so, the good news?” Irina asked. She and Chandra sat side by side in matching white bathrobes, rumpled from bed.
“The good news is that magic doesn’t generally upset the careful balance of a sanctum,” Nicolas said. “Magic can handle itself. That means whatever is upsetting the sanctum is an outside force, something it’s not familiar with.”
Ryan lifted his chin. “You think this is evidence that Daniel is… not magic. That he could be life, or consciousness, or something similar.”
“Yes, tentatively.” Nicolas’s reserved expression told me he was loath to get our hopes up with such a statement, but I couldn’t help smiling at the news.
Nicolas held up a hand that seemed primarily aimed at my reaction. “We can’t get ahead of ourselves, because there’s a bit more bad news. We need to stabilize the sanctum. There is no question about that. If the entity inside is the cause of the instabilities, we will need to deal with that one way or another. That means that even if we are certain Daniel is alive in there, if we can’t get him out, we will need to make some hard decisions.”
Teng lifted his dark eyes from his tablet. “You mean kill it.”
Nicolas glanced away. “Yes. We need to hurry with our research and experiments, and when we come to a conclusion, we need to act. It is unfortunate but true.”
Well, that destroyed any brief joy I felt at Nicolas’s news. Because Nicolas wasn’t at all sure how to get Daniel out of the sanctum, and that meant bad news all around.
“We can’t do that,” Irina said, aghast. “That’s… you’d be talking about killing him.”
Nicolas took a deep breath. Irina was a medical doctor—compassionate, principled, and sworn to uphold the sanctity of human life. Nicolas had much looser ethics.
“Irina,” he said, his voice low and throaty, “you know I don’t want that. But the alternatives… an established magic’s sanctum breaking? It could kill more than one person. It could kill many, and not just within this clan. We don’t know what happens when a sanctum is harmed in that manner.”
“We don’t know enough yet. When we find out more, things might look clearer,” Ryan said, putting a placating hand between them.
; I tried not to take too much hope from his gentle words.
No one seemed happy. Irina peppered Nicolas with more questions. Ryan and Cameron went back and forth about how exactly the alarm wards had been triggered, trying to glean something from the action. Teng stared out the window into the darkness, as lost in thought as I’d ever seen him.
Keisha startled me out of my own dark musings by handing me a mug of hot chocolate, thick and creamy, made from my own stash of Ghirardelli cocoa powder. I smiled, inhaling the rich scent.
“You are a great friend,” I said as she took a seat next to me and leaned her head on my shoulder.
I took a sip from the mug and then handed it to her. We traded back and forth for a few minutes.
Chandra joined us, plucking the mug out of my hands and drinking the rest of it. Keisha gave an exaggerated gasp and peered sadly into the mug at the dregs of chocolate. I laughed despite myself, but the carefree feeling only lasted for a moment, replaced quickly by the heavy weights of worry.
Seeing Daniel sacrifice himself last year had been bad enough. I wasn’t sure I could survive if we had to destroy him—kill him—ourselves. But Nicolas and the others loved him as much as I did. They would fight to rescue him, if whatever he was needed rescuing. I knew that.
So why was panic still gripping me like a vise? And what could I possibly do to make it go away?
I managed a few more hours of fitful sleep. When I woke in Nicolas’s bed, it was mid-morning, and he was gone from the apartment.
My limbs moved heavily and sleepily as I brushed my teeth and tied my hair back, my eyelids continually falling back down without any impetus. It was as if problems and magic had physical weight that dragged on me, even though they weighed nothing at all.
When I finally shambled back to the soubou, ready to enter my stories into the research database and prepare for my turn with Daniel the next day, I found Nicolas sitting in the kitchen with Jasmine.
“Oh, hey,” I said, startled. “I didn’t realize you were coming.”
“Fiona, hello,” she said warmly.
She and Nicolas were enjoying tea, talking quietly with their heads together. She turned over a fresh teacup for me and nudged a chair out from the table. I smiled and took a seat. I liked Jasmine a lot. Ryan’s sister was beautiful, serene, and unafraid to put Nicolas and Ryan in their places when needed. Despite that, Nicolas allowed himself to relax more with her than with anyone else in his life, possibly even more so than with me.
She had rescued him from Smoke, and the bond they shared because of that was unbreakable. Nicolas had so few people whom he trusted that I was happy to know he could confide in her, and he treated her like a favorite sister, cherished and irreplaceable.
“I caught a portal to Osaka this morning,” she said. “I’m technically in the area on other business, but of course I had to stop by.”
That business was likely for her clan, Verdant. I was just trying to figure out if Nicolas had told her about our new sanctum issues when he said, “Jazz’s timing is impeccable. I’d like to have her take a turn with Dan as well. As an outsider who wasn’t here during the clan’s creation, I think the results could be very helpful.”
He smiled at her and refilled my teacup, which I’d already drained twice.
“I think it would be best—” Nicolas’s phone vibrated on the table, and he glanced at it. “I’m sorry, I should take this.” He gave me an apologetic look. “It’s Mark.”
I rolled my eyes as he stood up from the table and made his way into the hall.
“Brothers, right?” I say, shaking my head.
Jasmine laughed. “I’m afraid I don’t have your… unique issues. I just have those two”—she waggled her slender fingers toward the hallway—“to care for.”
I raised a brow. “Yes, because Nicolas and Ryan are so low maintenance.”
“And to think, you see them at their best! You can’t imagine the officious monster Ryan was when we were little,” she said, but she was still smiling. “Or the whiny pain in the ass Nicolas was when I met him.”
Her light, teasing words told me how far they’d all come from the harrowing night that they’d fled Sydney together.
“Nicolas? No way,” I said sarcastically. “I can’t possibly imagine him complaining about anything. He’s so chill and all.”
Before Jasmine could say anything, Nicolas reentered the kitchen, his expression pinched in annoyance.
“Problem?” I asked.
“Nothing pressing,” Nicolas said. “Mark was letting me know that Xiao-Xiao and Jabari are going to try to bring charges against Lightning at the conclave.”
Xiao-Xiao and Jabari were two of the pinnacle members of Meteor.
“For what?” Jasmine asked.
“He doesn’t know, but he suspects it has something to do with us injuring their magicians in Cancun.” Nicolas came to stand behind me, placing a hand affectionately on my shoulder and running his fingers up along my neck. “It hardly matters. When it comes to clan standings, Lightning might actually be above Meteor. I fail to understand how they can ignore the fact that everyone hates them. Being invited to the conclave at all was a concession to them.”
“What’s their game, then?” I asked. “Picking a fight with us only makes them look bad.”
“What is your best guess?” Nicolas’s beautiful brown eyes met mine. “You are an expert on Meteor.”
“Um, you were just talking to my brother, a literal Meteor commander,” I pointed out.
“I trust you more,” he said, as though that settled the debate and there was no use arguing.
“Hm,” I said, fiddling with the edges of my teacup. I didn’t like being under his scrutiny. “You’re right. They have to know no one will care much for any drama they make. So… maybe it’s a distraction? Maybe they are doing a little sleight of hand, making the conclave look elsewhere?”
“Merely another thing we will need to keep a close eye on once we are there,” Nicolas said.
I cringed inwardly, reminded yet again that I had to go to a conclave in a couple of weeks, and I wasn’t at all prepared.
“Do you remember when you took me to Vancouver to watch figure skating?” I asked Dan as we walked along the hills beside the beach. “That was the best gift I’ve ever gotten.”
Ryan trailed behind us. He created minor wards and prestidigitations with his magic, claiming he was measuring inversion changes, but his real purpose here was to be my observer.
Dan smiled. “I hadn’t seen figure skating live before that. I didn’t know people could skate so fast.”
“That whole weekend was great,” I said. “That little Mediterranean place where we got breakfast? That guy who asked for your autograph because he thought you looked like Shoma Uno?”
It was easy to get Dan talking about things. He liked to reminisce, so all I needed to do was plant a few seeds, and he’d be off describing everything he remembered. I mmmed and ahhed at all the right places, trying to carefully catalog his words and make sure they lined up with my memories. And they did—Daniel accurately described the long flight, getting lost on the way to the hotel, the huge amount of downtime between each skater at the competition while we waited for scores to be announced and warm-ups to be completed, and our fun nights staying up late in the hotel room drinking sake and eating snacks.
“You were always more fun away from the clan house,” he said.
“It’s easier for me to relax when I’m not around magic,” I said. “I like magic, but… it’s difficult for me to handle. Its very existence is stressful, and I’m not good with stress. Some people… they go into a pressure cooker, and it brings out the best in them. Like you and Nicolas. For people like me, we just get crushed.”
“I know,” he said. He gave my shoulder a playful push. “Why do you think I took you hiking so much? You always needed to get away.”
Excellent. Perfect segue into my next story. The one I needed to somehow lie my way through.
“Your hikes are too insane for me,” I said. “The best one I remember was when you took me to Tai O.”
“Yeah?” Daniel said, glancing over at me.
“God, when was that?” I asked. “August? It was raining really hard all morning.”
Daniel tilted his head. “August, yeah, but it wasn’t raining.” He gestured out to the ocean. “The water gets muddy when it rains. I wouldn’t have brought you there if it had. It would have ruined the view.”
Lie number one detected.
“The food was so good,” I said. “All that seafood, and they fried it for us right there.”
“That’s why we’re friends, Fi.” Dan’s smile widened. “A shared love of food.”
“We hiked for like five miles after that meal. I needed all those calories!” I said. “I was really glad you took me up to the temple, though. That was my first time burning an incense offering, and it meant a lot to me.”
Dan gave me a suspicious sideways glance. It didn’t help that my voice seemed an octave higher, trembling with fear, and my words were far more stilted than usual. I wasn’t good at these games of pretend.
“What is up with you?” Dan asked. “I took you to Wong Tai Sin a day before that to burn incense.”
Wong Tai Sin was the largest temple in the Sha Tin area, where Water’s clan house was located. Lie number two detected.
“Oh, shit, you’re right,” I said. “Sorry. I feel so scattered lately with all my work. I need another day relaxing with you.”
“If I get out of here, I’ll take you to Hong Kong, and we’ll hike more.”
“Yeah, back to Tai O. I want to take one of those sampan boats out. On a day we don’t have to get back to attend one of Nicolas’s stodgy meetings.”
Dan shook his head. “I think that was my fault. It wasn’t a meeting with Nicolas; it was a meeting with Teng to reorganize our storage system. Which we ended up throwing out a month later, anyhow.”
