“Such as? What would I do? I’ve done nothing else here, and if the world I knew is truly dust…” He hesitated, then added, “I’d hoped to meet some of my brothers’ kin someday. A foolish thought, wasn’t it?”
“It’s…unlikely,” I allowed. “Not impossible, but with so many generations…when, exactly, were you born?”
He shifted his weight on the rail. “The summer before we defeated the Poeni for the second time.”
I thought hard, trying to remember what I’d learned of the ancient Mediterranean. “Hannibal?”
“Yes. The consulship of Servilius and Claudius Nero. Do you know their names, my lord?”
“I don’t, but I can estimate from that. Twenty-two centuries? That’s sixty or seventy generations, but there’s a chance…” I pulled my homemade phone from my pocket, dialed, and waited while it rang on the other end as Valerius watched me curiously. The ringing gave way to a low grunt quickly enough, and I wondered what time it was in Montana. “Toula? Hi. I need a witch.”
“Screw you,” she grumbled, and the phone went dead in my hand.
Valerius frowned, but I put the phone away and pointed to the gate opening behind us. “She loves me, she just doesn’t know it. Ah, Glinda,” I called as Toula stomped through, sporting a ragged gray T-shirt and plaid boxers. “A vision, as always.”
One finger rose in an unmistakable salute as she smoothed her drooping spikes with her other hand. “You got a death wish, Gramps?”
“Not tonight. How’s your blood magic?”
Toula closed the gate and folded her arms. “Decent. What were you after, and will this piss Greg off?”
“I’m looking for a kinship trace, and no,” I replied, cocking my head at Valerius. “Living relatives—can you work with him?”
She mumbled under her breath until a glowing orb rose before her, lighting a path through the grass. “With whom? You?” she asked Valerius. “Misplaced your kids or something?”
“I have none,” he said, eyeing her with caution. “My brothers’ descendants—”
“Ooh, that’s a problem,” she replied, and sucked her teeth. “Blood works vertically—anyone in your direct line. Parents, children, grandparents, grandkids, you get the drill. But tell you what,” she added, seeing his face fall, “it would work from your parents. A blood trace from either of them would lead to your nephews and nieces.”
“Impossible,” he mumbled. “My father’s long dead, and my brothers were his alone.”
She squinted back at him. “So…you’re half fae?”
“Presumably. Affinity for magic, allergy to iron.”
“Yeah, sounds about right. Well, shit,” she muttered, and frowned at the night as she thought. “Who’s your mother, then?”
“She never claimed me. All I know is I’m not the queen’s,” he said with a weak smile.
“Ah.” She scratched her ribs and yawned. “If you think she’s still around, I could use blood magic to track her. But if you’re looking for mortal relatives…well, there’s an option, but it’s a long shot.” She propped one foot on the fence and leaned past me to talk to the captain. “Aural comparison. I’ve never worked with mundane lines, but that doesn’t mean I can’t. It just means the pool is massive. But here’s what I can do: I’ll store your signature—your paternal half, at least—and if I get a chance to look at anyone promising, I’ll see if I can get a match. Your ancestry is…”
“Roman, back to the founding.”
Toula cut her eyes to me, and I nodded. “Born in the Republic.”
“Oy,” she said, rubbing a quartz band on her left index finger. “Lot of generations in there. Half of Italy might conceivably be part of that line, you know?” She shrugged. “Hell, maybe it’ll help my odds. I’m Toula, by the way,” she added, jutting her hand toward Valerius. “Don’t think Colin’s ever made the formal introductions. Grand magus’s go-between.”
He clasped her hand and smiled with more enthusiasm. “Valerius. You’re the wizard the realm dislikes, yes?” he asked, glancing at me for verification.
“The realm dislikes all wizards,” I replied before Toula could protest. “And she’s actually a witch-blood.”
Valerius examined her face more closely in the orb’s light, and his eyes widened in recognition. “Of course. I arrived late, but you were there…”
“I offed Titania,” she finished for him, releasing her grip. “And Gramps offed my mother, but that still doesn’t give him permission to get me out of bed at ungodly hours,” she added, glaring for good measure.
He frowned bemusedly. “Your mother—”
“Mab. Ready?” she asked, avoiding the conversation. Valerius nodded, and Toula started muttering her incantation, a long string of bastardized Latin I assumed to be of her own creation.
As the ghost of a sphere began to materialize, Valerius murmured, “Your accent is terrible.”
Toula opened one eye and paused the spell. “Man, you try learning a dead language, and then we can talk about nuances. Now let me work.”
He withheld further criticism, and a moment later, a red and blue sphere appeared before him. Toula cracked her neck and peered at the lattice, then split it into its component halves. “Okay, that’s your father,” she explained, pointing to the blue side. “Your half brothers carried that as well, and anyone down their line would have a hint of it. See how tight the weave is?” she said, then pointed to the red side. “Fae. Fewer generations, less complex. Your mother…”
Toula studied the red lattice for a moment in silence, then tapped out a complicated pattern on her ring. The quartz illuminated from within, and a set of spheres appeared above her hand, mostly green and blue. “I store what I’ve seen for later comparison,” she said, beating me to my question, “and that lattice looks familiar.” She repeatedly flicked her wrist to the side, cycling through the projected orbs until a red lattice appeared. “Bingo,” she muttered, then held her hand near Valerius’s lattice to compare.
“Identical,” he whispered as the images aligned. “What does that mean?”
She looked up from her work and bit her lip. “Well, um…all full siblings carry the same aural signatures. A common partial lattice in two people’s signatures means they have either a shared ancestor or ancestors who had the same parents, yes?”
He nodded. “So…that thing in your hand, that’s either my mother or one of her siblings?”
“Exactly. And it would have to be a full sibling.” Toula turned to me with a strange expression on her face. “Was Mab an only child?”
Valerius jumped in before I could answer. “None of the Three had full siblings,” he replied. “And by the time I came to the realm, they had eliminated their half siblings.” He paused briefly, puzzling over the question, before the realization hit. “That’s from Mab?” he exclaimed. “My mother was of Mab’s line?”
“No. She was Mab,” said Toula, and projected a red and green sphere from her ring. “This is my signature—it’s where I got her lattice to start with. I, uh…I guess that means we’re…you know.” She closed her hand into a fist, and both the projection and Valerius’s sphere vanished. “Look, you don’t have to worry,” she said quietly, “I’m not going to say anything. If I come across any of your other people, I’ll be in touch.” She cleared her throat, nodded curtly, and ripped open a new gate with a wave of her hand. “Good night,” she mumbled, and started toward home.
“Toula, wait!” Valerius called after her, jumping off the fence. “Don’t go, I—”
She stopped in her tracks, took a deep breath, and turned around. “Really, I promise,” she said, holding her empty palms up to stop his progress, “no one’s going to know. I can keep my mouth shut.”
He paused a few feet from her, watching her redden in the glow of her lantern orb. “You…you’re my sister?” he murmured.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Toula hugged herself and scowled at the grass. “My name is Toula P
avli,” she muttered. When that garnered no response, she added, “My father was Apollonios Pavli.” Valerius remained silent, and she sighed. “You don’t know who he was, do you?”
“Should I?”
“Arcanum executed him for mass murder,” she said, her face hardening even as it burned. “So, that plus Mab…yeah, sorry, I’ll keep quiet. No one’s going to know.”
He caught her arm before she could slip through the gate, and she turned again, confused. “Please stay. Please, I…” he started, then faltered and tried again. “Please.”
She looked down at his hand, perplexed by its presence on her triceps. “You have my word, I won’t—”
“You’re my sister.”
I couldn’t see his expression from my perch, but Toula’s brows knit as she looked back at him. “I won’t tell—”
“I’ve never had a sister,” he interrupted in a rush. “Well, perhaps I have,” he amended, “but none I’ve known as mine…” He grabbed her hands and peered at her flushed face. “You’re really my sister? Truly?”
Toula’s mouth opened and closed silently, and then she found her voice once more. “I…yeah, I guess I’m your half sister…”
The end of that thought was squeezed from her as Valerius pulled her into a rib-crushing embrace. When he let her breathe once more, she took a step back and shook her head. “I don’t understand, you, uh…you’re not upset?”
“Why would I be upset?” he exclaimed, still clinging to her arms. “Have you any idea how long I’ve been alone? I haven’t known any family in…how long was it, my lord?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder.
“Twenty-two hundred years, give or take,” I replied, slipping off the fence.
Valerius nodded emphatically at Toula. “And this is the best thing to happen in many of them, so please stay. Will you stay? Say you will, please…”
I approached in time to see Toula’s eyes well. “I don’t…I mean…you actually want to be kin to me?” she asked incredulously, her voice wavering.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“No one wants me,” was all she managed before the tears began to spill. Valerius pulled her back into his arms as Toula, who had watched her own mother die without flinching, sobbed like a child.
One of the gifts that come with age is knowing when one’s presence is no longer desired. I closed the gate Toula had opened and sneaked away, leaving them to get acquainted in private. Although I intended to retire, however, I soon found myself lingering outside the open door of Aiden’s room.
He looked up from his cooler—now equipped with tires and a little antenna—and grinned at my knock. “Hey! Check it out, I got the wheels synchronized,” he said, climbing off the floor to grab a joystick from his desk. “The basics are down, but I want to program a few tricks in—make it pop a wheelie or something. Maybe tomorrow, huh?”
Aiden tiptoed barefoot through a minefield of spare parts to join me, then coaxed the cooler to life and promptly drove it into the wall. “Steering’s a little touchy,” he muttered, throwing it into reverse and nudging it into a five-point turn, “but that’s adjustable.”
The cooler drove straight into my shins, and Aiden mumbled an apology as he parked it. “Impressive,” I said, rubbing the impact site. “Have you tried it loaded?”
He flipped the lid up with the touch of a button. “Not yet. Want to do the honors?”
I filled the bin with ice and brown bottles, and Aiden plucked one out for an inspection. “Root beer?” he enquired, flipping the unlabeled bottle around in his hand.
“Small beer,” I explained. “Slakes your thirst, but won’t get you drunk quite as quickly. It’s about three proof.”
Aiden nodded, seemingly satisfied, and popped the cap against the edge of the cooler’s new wheel frame. “Not bad,” he said after a quick swig. “Not great, but not bad. You want one?” he added, lifting another bottle from the ice.
The hour was late, the room was a steel-strewn disaster, but my little brother’s eyes were hopeful. “Sure,” I said, and made myself a couch in a distant corner free of scrap metal while he practiced drinking and driving his new toy.
Perhaps, I mused—and not for the first time that season—I wasn’t the world’s best role model.
CHAPTER 11
* * *
I woke the next morning with a vague sense that something was amiss. The bed was as I had last seen it, and the sunlight was the proper shade of orange-pink—not too early, not too late—but the atmosphere of my chambers felt off, and I struggled to put a label on the problem while I rose and ran through my mental to-do list. And then it hit me: it was too quiet. Oh, the realm was still there at the back of my thoughts, omnipresent and finicky as always, but something in the quality of the sound around me had changed. I sat on the edge of the bed, hearing nothing but my own breathing, and listened, trying to pinpoint what was different.
I was alone.
Seldom did my suite go unguarded, and so I sneaked over to the door, called up a fireball, and cracked the door open, halfway expecting to find a mob quietly skulking in the corridor—but there was no one present, and I let the fire die. Puzzled, I barricaded myself in the room and tried to piece together what could have happened. Valerius made the rota for my guards, but he always checked with me first thing in the morning in case something had happened overnight…
Valerius. I’d left him with Toula, and then there had been Aiden’s pet project, and finding my way to bed a few hours before…
The problem, I concluded with relative rapidity, considering the hour, was that I’d misplaced my captain.
Two minutes later, I let myself into my office and found a folded piece of paper on the floor waiting for me. A note under the door, I realized, and opened it to see a nearly illegible blue scrawl:
Hey Gramps,
I’m taking V on vacation for a bit. Don’t be difficult—I told him you wouldn’t mind, and he needs this. Try to be cool and deal with it, okay?
XOXO,
T
I leaned against one of the couches and endeavored to let that sink in, but was finding the exercise trying without coffee. The Arcanum’s punkish problem child and my shaken, depressed captain, a man who’d probably never even heard of electricity, running around together somewhere in the mortal realm—the thought was enough to knot my stomach, but I attempted to relax. Toula wasn’t stupid. Surely she wouldn’t let Valerius play in traffic. Surely she’d warn him about the iron hidden everywhere. Surely she wouldn’t take him anywhere with a strong Arcanum presence.
Moon and stars, surely he hadn’t gone armed.
I was fairly confident that I could have tracked them down—Greg would have known how to find Toula, at least—but I forced myself to let the matter go. Valerius was no child, and Toula…well, technically, she wasn’t one, either. I could manage without them for a time, and I knew Joey wouldn’t mind a chance to lick his wounds.
And so I went about my business for the next two days, arbitrating a few disputes, making sure Aiden stopped working for food breaks, but generally slipping off to see Meggy. With Olive in school and the bookstore traffic slow, I assumed she would have time to meet me. Wednesday passed pleasantly enough—Olive had practice that evening, and so we had a chance to grab a midweek dinner in front of the television before our daughter dragged herself in, caught me on the couch with a pizza, and wailed that Meggy’s rules about boyfriends were completely arbitrary and unfair, and that we were trying to make her life miserable. I explained that the first thing on my mind every morning was finding new ways to torture her, which merited rolled eyes, a slammed door, and Meggy’s pursed-lip disapproval.
I’d planned to coax Meggy out for a picnic the next day, but when I showed up at the store around ten, I discovered that she had company. Meggy glanced away from her customer at the sound of the bell and shot me a quick look of desperation, then turned her attention and polite smile back to the thin man lecturing her from the far side of the counter. �
�Really? And how’s that going for you?” she asked him as I closed the door, but piercing his monologue did nothing to impede its progress.
The shadows obscured his features, but I recognized Stuart the White’s slightly nasal tone and skinny frame. “Early lunch break, Stu?” I asked, hoping to distract him.
Stuart jerked in surprise, peered down the aisle at me, and frowned. “Christophe.”
“Close enough,” I replied, striding toward the counter. “Hi, Meggy. Any chance of stealing you for lunch?”
She cocked her head at the ceiling. “Well, I’d have to consider my day planner, but yeah, on preliminary assessment, I think I can squeeze you in. Thoughts?”
“Beach picnic? The pavilion’s empty—”
Before I could finish my sentence, Stuart’s eyes widened. “An excellent idea! You know, I saw evidence of fairy activity there about a week ago…”
As he launched into his story, I locked eyes with Meggy and silently sighed. The only faerie activity that pavilion had ever seen was on a moonless night the previous August when Meggy and I thought we had the beach to ourselves—and that was almost interrupted by a quartet of marauding teenagers—but there’s no dissuading a true believer, and the chance to further his research brought color to Stuart’s cheeks. Before I quite realized what had happened, our lunch for two had become a three-top, and Stuart walked between us all the way to the corner market and back down to the shore, chatting nonstop about lights in the sky and his “little wingèd friends.”
“You know,” I managed to interject when he broke for air, “I was recently talking to a paranormal investigator who lives in the area—”
“Please,” Stuart scoffed, dropping his heavy shopping bag onto a splintering picnic table, “those amateurs wouldn’t know a ghost if one came up and socked them in the jaw. Now, to summon and trap a spirit, one must take proper precautions…”
Across the table, Meggy’s eyebrow rose in silent accusation: You had to start him up again.
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