by K. F. Breene
“It wasn’t my fault.” Isaias put up his hands. “You have to believe me.”
“You sold Conrad out, and then told them how to get past our wards. Then you just left.”
“I had to! It was safer for you that way.”
Emery gave a humorless laugh. “Safer for me? I’m the Mages’ Guild’s number one most wanted. You chased me out of my home. You chased me out of safety.”
The old mage shook his balding head. His jowls jiggled with the movement. “You have to believe me, Emery. It wasn’t my fault.”
Blackness crept through Emery’s mind at the sight of his mentor’s guilt-ridden face. “Tell me why,” Emery said, his demand sounding more like a plea. “Tell me why.”
“They said they wouldn’t hurt you boys. They just wanted you out of the way, that’s all. You have to realize, Emery—the Mages’ Guild doesn’t like anyone they can’t control. Conrad was gathering supporters. And he had you, another natural waiting in the wings. He was amassing power, don’t you see? Amassing power with the intent of overturning the system. I had to warn them of what Conrad planned. What he wanted to do was madness. Don’t you understand how much money we stood to lose if Conrad took over? How much power?”
The world dropped out from under Emery’s feet. Weightless, all he could do was stare at his former mentor in confused disbelief for a moment. “How much we stood to lose?” he asked incredulously. Painful pressure ripped at his heart. “We? As in…you?” He gulped, the action difficult. A humorless smile pulled at his lips and he narrowed his eyes. “You’re kidding, right? You just told them what they wanted to know… You weren’t actually…one of them, were you?”
Isaias’s eyes tightened. His mouth worked for a moment, nothing coming out. Finally, he found his voice. “I should’ve told you. I should’ve. That was wrong of me. But it wasn’t important back then. My job coincided with what you boys needed. We were working together. Why ruin that? Then, when the guild called me in, I had no choice. I thought they’d force you to disappear. Peaceful resolution for everyone. I had no idea they’d kill your brother, Emery. You have to believe me. I thought they’d just scare you boys.”
Emery held up his hand to stop the conflicting babble of someone he’d once thought of as a father figure. His limbs slowly numbed, like his mind.
He’d expected a confrontation that would turn his stomach, but he’d thought Isaias would admit to buckling under torture. Or maybe because he’d somehow thought he was helping. Emery had never expected, not once, that Isaias had sold them out because it was his job. That Isaias had befriended them, helped them, trained them…for the guild.
He’d been the enemy from day one.
“Did Conrad know about this?” Emery asked in a wispy voice.
“No.” Isaias waved his hands. “But I had intended to tell him. When the time was right, I was going to explain the truth.”
“But how…” Memories flashed in bright lights before Emery’s eyes. “How could this have escaped him? He had high clearance in the guild.”
“He had no reason to go looking.” Isaias spread his hands. “And even if he did, his clearance wasn’t high enough.”
Emery pulled air from his lungs, still unable to get enough. Memories continued to barrel into him. The dark days and sleepless nights after his parents died. The pain and the fear. Conrad and Emery were given the choice to live with a few distant relations, but no one really wanted them.
Then, out of the blue, they went to the store to pick up some lunch and ran into a man claiming to be a friend of their parents. What a strange and wonderful coincidence. He claimed he’d stopped by the store on his way to the social worker’s house to meet them. From the word go, Isaias said all the right things, knew all the right facts, and then he threw the perfect curveball.
They were different, he said.
They were special.
They had magic.
He was a light in their darkness, serving up candied words when everything else tasted like dirt. And what do you know—like the very magic he spoke of, he was approved to take custody of Emery and his brother when they were barely teens, until they could stand on their own. To train them. To shape them.
So the guild could use them.
It had all been a lie. Plotted, planned out. They’d been raised to be instruments.
Looking at it through this lens, the events that had placed Conrad and Emery in Isaias’s custody looked a lot less like fate, and lot more like the contrived circumstances of an extremely powerful organization.
Emery let out a shaky breath. “You told them how to break into Conrad’s and my home. The wards you insisted on helping us create, even though we didn’t need you at that point.”
“You were scrappy. I knew that even if they got in, you’d get away!”
“Just like you probably thought Conrad would get away, too.”
A shadow crossed Isaias’s visage, and just like that, Emery knew.
Isaias hadn’t thought Conrad would get away at all. He’d known what the guild would do to him, and he’d served him up on a platter. Then he’d sent them after Emery, the flunky, next.
Isaias was the reason Conrad was dead. He was the reason Emery had no life. No future.
The kicker was that Emery had had a chance to go with his brother. The invite to see somewhere new—a distant land—had been extended, and it was only because Emery was working on something that he’d declined.
He could’ve helped his brother. Given him a much-needed ally.
Saved him.
It was hard to breathe. Hard to think.
“And now you’re hiding,” Emery said in a whisper. “Why is that, I wonder?”
“Because the guild wants him dead,” Solas said from just outside the doorway. “The guild in the Brink are corrupt. Everyone knows that. If you are no longer necessary, you are executed. Although…maybe they left him alive to monitor him in the hopes he’d lure you to him. Like he has done.”
“They wouldn’t be able to find him.” Emery shook his head, his mind racing. “I could barely find him, and I know how his mind works.”
“The guild probably didn’t predict that,” Solas said, crossing her arms. “He is a loose end. One that wronged you horribly. Tie it up. Send him to his maker.”
“The new plan is already in place,” Isaias said with a manic twinkle in his eyes. All pretense of pleading dropped away. Rage took its place. “With Conrad out of the way, the setup was easy. The rewards plentiful. Dark magic has its benefits. And I could’ve stayed and reaped those rewards if Conrad had just listened to me. If he had gotten off his high horse and seen what was possible. You should blame your brother, not me. He killed us all.” His mouth twisted in distaste and he pinched a casing and threw, still fast despite his age. Or maybe Emery was just horribly slow right then.
A stream of black blistered through the air. Emery lifted his hand to shield himself, but he needn’t have bothered.
Hot air rushed in front of his body, filling the space between him and Isaias. It spun like a tornado, sucking up the hex, and then twisted upward, toward the ceiling. Plaster and paint flew from the sides. Wood groaned.
“Shall I end this?” Solas asked with sparkling green eyes. So much electricity filled the air that Emery’s hair stood on end. “A lightning bolt would be efficient.”
“How did you gain the favor of a weather Elemental?” Isaias asked with widened eyes. He clutched another capsule.
“She is much more than just a weather Elemental,” Emery said, siphoning power from the mini-storm. He pulled elements from within the room and bent them to his will. A tight weave wrapped around his old mentor, pinning Isaias’s hands to his sides. “And I was in the right place, at the right time. Leave him, Solas. Let the guild deal with him however they will.”
“No! Not that. Emery, please. You don’t understand—” Isaias pinched the casing in his hand and jerked, trying to throw it. It hit the desk and bounced back, hitting his side in
stead.
A puff of green was all the warning the spell gave. It ate through Isaias’s shirt like acid and into the skin of his stomach, burrowing down.
Isaias started to scream, twisting against the magical binding Emery had just constructed. Emery’s heart ached, but not because the spell had been intended for him. In that moment, he didn’t care that his mentor had wanted to kill him gruesomely in order to save himself. This was the man who had pulled him out of the darkness. The man who’d taught Emery and Conrad to use their incredible gifts. Call him sentimental, or a plain fool, but it killed him to see his mentor leave the world like this. Didn’t matter what Isaias had done.
“End it,” Emery said to Solas as he turned away from the grisly sight. “End his suffering.”
A bolt of lightning blasted down from the ceiling. It struck Isaias’s head. The screaming cut off suddenly.
The wind died down and silence filled the room.
Heavy-hearted, Emery stripped away his spells from the door.
“You are too soft for this war you fight,” Solas said as she stepped aside.
He didn’t meet her eyes. “Once upon a time, he was a father figure, of sorts. Regardless of the lies he told, for good or bad, he made me what I am. It’s hard to get around that.”
“I see. And when you meet the Mages’ Guild?”
He led her out of the building and back to the gateway between worlds. This had been a detour. A lingering question. Isaias had nothing to do with the guild members whose names he’d collected thus far. With the war Emery had inherited from Conrad.
The war he intended on fighting with everything he had.
It was time to truly face the guild. He knew the name of the hired gun that had killed his brother, knew the office that man had worked out of at the time, three years ago. He would visit that office in Seattle to start collecting more information. From then, he had but to follow the trail.
“When I meet the guild,” Emery said, “they will rue the day they tore apart my world.”
Chapter Six
Hollow metal poles clattered against the dirt walkway. I jumped, flinched, and spun, all at the same time. I’d even managed to grab my sweater and pull it tighter around my chest mid-spin. My reactions were at once fast and useless, something I never would’ve thought of a month ago.
“You’re so jumpy,” Geraldine, the stall neighbor on my left, said with a booming laugh. She brushed her short dirty-blonde hair out of her round face as she surveyed me. “You look like a ghost is following you around.”
There probably were ghosts following me around. How should I know? There were certain experiences that changed you, plain and simple. Like sitting in an old magical couple’s kitchen after a retreat-turned-bloody-battle and learning from them that mythical creatures were real. It was impossible to go through that and then return to reality as you knew it. Because even if everyone I’d talked to in New Orleans had been lying in some elaborate Penny is so gullible, let’s have some fun prank, there was still that floating ball of fire behind Reagan. There was still that inexplicable gothic church out in the middle of nowhere. And, oh, I don’t know, the cauldron spitting out patterns and colors that turned people into zombies!
Even my thoughts turned shrill at that last thought.
Because yes, it had been explained to me in calm tones that I had helped a powerful mage turn a bunch of unsuspecting women into zombies.
Me. Penny Bristol. The girl who had, until that point, lived a boring, uneventful, dull life of routine.
Which meant two things. One, I was a fool for randomly trusting a set of instructions without a description or even a title—lesson learned—and two, zombies were real. They weren’t caused by a super virus or an experiment gone wrong (yet); they were made by magic. By a potion that was stored, clear as day, in my noggin. So I had that riding around with me.
I blew out a breath. The three magical avengers from New Orleans thought I was a mage.
No, that wasn’t true.
Callie, the older, brash one with the inappropriate sweatpants, said that without training, I was a natural witch. It was Dizzy, her husband, who said I was a mage. A very gifted mage who would probably kill a neighborhood someday soon if I didn’t get training. He liked to deliver horrible news with a smile.
Thankfully, by that point, the third member in the strange magical group, Reagan, had plied me with so much whiskey that I could barely sit on my stool. It made all the news bearable.
Until I woke up, of course, and proceeded to get out of there as fast as I could.
I’d decided to go back to my old life. Ignore the piece of myself that was missing. Because in all honesty, if that aching hole was meant to be filled with murder and mayhem, if magic was dangerous (at least in my hands), I was better off bored but safe. Any idiot could tell you that.
So here I was, in a job my mother found for me, fighting a feeble canvas tent at a medieval-style amusement village outside of Seattle. As soon as the blasted thing would behave and stand up straight, I could set up my usual wares: tarot cards, colorful stones, and fake crystal ball. If people wanted badly told and often wrong fortunetelling, I was open for business on an ever-changing schedule during often weird and annoying mid-day hours.
I ignored Geraldine’s second burst of laughter as I clipped the canvas in place. My stall up, I took the flimsy card table off my rickety cart and pulled out the legs.
“Looks like rain,” Geraldine said as she went about clicking her poles into each other, making a much sturdier frame than I just had. It was why she got most of the choosey clientele. She didn’t look the part of a road-weary and uninterested gypsy out of the medieval times without two cents to rub together. She looked like a modern hobbyist who may or may not have any insight into the occult, but would be an exuberant and fun distraction nonetheless. The fact that her chairs wouldn’t buckle under their butts was probably another advantage.
I’d follow that business model if I had the money to spare. As it was, after the New Orleans monetary setback, I’d decided to save every last penny in an attempt to get my own place and escape my mother’s ever-watchful gaze.
I draped a tablecloth over the card table, set up a chair, and slowed down. This was the most important part of my setup, and why I showed up earlier than most of the other vendors. What went where on the table mattered…at least for me. If things weren’t placed just so, I’d draw a blank the moment someone sat across from me. When the setup was right, it was easier for me to pick up on little clues. Tells about what the person might like to hear.
“I doubt we’ll make it through the day.” Geraldine breathed heavily as she grabbed newish, unstained fabric to drape over her tentlike setup. “Almost summer, though. It’ll start drying up soon.”
I glanced at the heavy Washington sky, thick and gray. Clouds shifted while drifting, churning up darker patches in the sky. Electric energy gave the soft breeze a positive charge as it rolled by with a slight chill. Green trees and foliage swayed and nodded around the dirt walkway.
I stilled in the moment, taking it all in. The vibrancy and energy of my surroundings invigorated me. I allowed the earthy smell to comfort me, buffering against the supercharged atmosphere that sent shivers of anticipation through my body.
This was one of the reasons I still got mocked. I couldn’t help but stand there with my hands splayed out and my face slightly upturned, listening to the nature around me. Feeling it slide across my skin and fill me up with light. In school, I’d been taunted and bullied for being weird. The bullies who bothered me now might limit themselves to strange looks and crooked smiles, but I could always see their eyes calling me crazy.
Before I might’ve muttered an apology, torn down my arms, and bowed my face in embarrassment. Not anymore. There were worse things a person could do, like turn a bunch of women into zombies.
Coming back to myself, I noticed Geraldine staring at me, like she was waiting for an answer.
“Sorry, what wa
s that?” I asked, figuring she’d asked a question while I was in my mini-trance.
Her eyebrows shot up and she smoothed the fabric along the side pole of her tent. “Not a thing at all. How’s your mother?”
“Same as yesterday.”
“Surly as ever?”
“Yep.” I laughed as I picked up my duffel bag and looked through it. The crystal ball came out first. That thing was a sham if I ever saw one. It went in the same spot it always did—a little off to the side, closer to me than the guest. Same with the tarot cards, though they got to be a little closer to the customer. They were real, even if I couldn’t correctly interpret them.
“Eeny, meeny, miny…” Geraldine’s voice drifted off as she hefted up her portable table, something too flashy and sturdy to be called a card table.
“The placement of the ancient relics is a serious affair,” I said with a lofty voice as I debated what to bring out next.
Her laughter was strained by the wrestling match with the table. I didn’t offer to help her. We’d made a deal on my first day out here. She didn’t help me, and I didn’t help her. If the wind blew my tent to the other side of the medieval village and got stuck in the jousting match while the horses were running, it was my problem.
I would’ve been offended, thinking she was making that rule after seeing my shoddy setup, but all the other vendors had nodded in unison. Everyone was out for themselves. It was how things were done.
I placed a crystal at the right corner of the table before hesitating. It didn’t feel right there, not with the weather the way it was. On the other side, it felt more balanced, so I moved it there. The amethyst was next, placed just off to the side of center, right in the way. That was annoying, but it felt right, so what could I do? I hated fishing for information. The whole outgoing, chatty shtick went against my natural desire to hide in my sweater like a turtle. I’d rather just work around a rock.
All twelve of my stones were placed in this way. It was when I set down the last that I realized I hadn’t put down the hippie scarf that seemed to signify my trade.
