by Anton Strout
I watched the man work in silence for several minutes. Without the sound of my father or Devon picking away at me, I enjoyed the reprieve from all the noise until the man turned from the table with a large vial in his hand and crossed the cargo hold to where I hung. He took my face in the cool of his hand, standing on his toes to meet my eyes.
“Listen, Stan,” he said, searching my face as he raised the vial over the top of my head. “I know the real you is not fully at the wheel right now, but I know you’re still in there.”
He tilted his wrist, and the mixture poured from the vial onto me, cool and wet, as an electric charge slammed into my mind.
“This should help bring you out, if only for a little while.”
The dominant presence that had ruled over me for days faded into the background, its panic at being suppressed quieting more and more every second that passed. My true self rose to the surface of my thoughts with only the edge of my mind still clouded. “What are you doing to me?”
“Just needed to talk to the old you for a few minutes,” he said, lowering his voice and looking around to make sure the hold was still clear of others. “I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced. My name’s Caleb. Caleb Kennedy. Met a few friends of yours the other day. Nerdy guy, girl with a pointy-stick thing, and a hottie with a big stone book.”
I could not help but smile, pained though it was to think of them, but it faded as quick as it came.
“How did you come to meet them?” I asked, worried.
“Can’t really get into the finer details right now,” he said. “Just wanted you to know that everything I’ve done to you had been business. Nothing personal. I’m sorry to have put you through all this.”
“Release me, then,” I said, daring to allow myself a moment of hope.
The man stepped back from me, hesitant.
“I can’t do that,” he said.
With my own self at the front of my thoughts, anger filled me, and I roared, spreading my wings wide, but the chains through them held fast, and the human moved just out of my reach.
“Sorry,” he continued. “But I’m in a bit of a tight spot here. If I do something like that, Kejetan would have me killed.”
“I will take care of the man I once called father,” I said.
Caleb shook his head at me. “No,” he said. “You won’t.” He pulled back his sleeve and checked what I knew the humans called a watch. “Already, the concoction I gave you should be fading.”
The other presence within picked away at me, rising once more. “Then hurry and let me loose to face him,” I shouted. “I will destroy Kejetan for the situation he has brought on us all.”
Caleb smiled at me. “You might be able to take him on; I have no doubt of that,” he said. “But I don’t think you would escape this ship facing off against the whole of his fellow stone men or his human servants. And—this is the most important part to me—I don’t want to die or incur Kejetan’s wrath in the process.”
“You live your life as a coward,” I said, feeling my true voice beginning to slip back behind the wall of the dominant one.
“That’s not the first time I’ve been called that,” he said, grim. “I prefer the term self-preservationist.”
The struggle on my face must have been evident as the human looked on with concern. My wings relaxed on the chains, my body betraying me in service to the other presence rising in me.
“Why draw me out?” my inner voice cried out. “Why talk to me only to leave me here in Kejetan’s servitude?”
“I pulled the real you forward, so I could tell you that I’m sorry.”
“I will find a way to overcome this presence,” I said, struggling against its domination. “While I must obey it, my true self has always remained, bowing to it only when it is forced to do so, but I’ve been fighting it, tricking it. And if I can trick it, I can beat it.”
“There it is!” Caleb said, a dark smile taking over his face. “Exactly what I thought might be going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“You see, I know that when your master has me assign tasks to you, I need to be very specific. I’ve been very lax about that to this point, running up the meter for the sake of my wallet, but things seem to be getting a bit crazy in my life as of late. And if I want to stay safe and living, I need to give Kejetan what he desires, what he really wants: results. I’m really in a bind here.”
“No,” I said, fearing whatever this human had to say next, fearing what specific task he meant to set upon me. “I beg of you . . . speak with care of what you will ask of me.”
“Oh, I’ll be careful,” he said with a smile. “In fact, I’ll name the exact time and place you can pry Alexander Belarus’s master tome from the cold, dead hands of your biggest fan, Alexandra.”
My inner voice was nearly shut down now, but at Caleb’s words my rising anger forced it back to the surface. “If you harm her, I will find you and take your life,” I said. “You have my word on that, human.”
“I’m not going to kill her,” he said, turning to pull several more vials from his coat. “I’ll leave that up to the professionals. I’ll leave that up to you. Kejetan’s order.”
My mouth opened to roar, but nothing came out. Once more, I was no longer the force in control of my actions. My true voice fell silent. The only hint of my anguish now lay in the screaming voice that dwelled deep in the center of me, crushed as it was, like a bug under the heel of a boot, by the dominant voice.
“As . . . you . . . wish,” I said against my will, and waited to learn the time and place where I would kill Alexandra.
Fifteen
Alexandra
“You want to tell me why you have me counting all the time?” I asked Caleb, sitting across the table from me.
Caleb leaned back in his chair, looking around the bar he had brought me to, Eccentric Circles. I hadn’t ever been there before, but it seemed popular enough that the place was crowded and loud. “Are you doing it now?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, stopping to think about it, looking around the room.
“Focus,” Caleb said. “Why aren’t you sure?”
I sighed. “You told me to do it at the back of my mind,” I said. “So it’s not like I’m consciously thinking about it. I kind of have to—I don’t know—mentally switch gears.”
Caleb’s eyes stayed locked with mine, unwilling to let up. “So . . . are you doing it or not?”
I reached out to that part of my mind, surprised to find I was counting, and nodded.
“Good,” he said.
“That still doesn’t tell me why I’m doing it,” I said, my annoyance coming through in my words.
“Look around,” he said, turning away from me to take in our surroundings. “Tell me what you see.”
The bar was crowded with people at every booth and table, and it was standing room only by the bar itself. “I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “People. Lots and lots of people . . . ?”
It was Caleb’s turn to sigh. He leaned forward, knocking over his glass in the process. His drink spilled out across the table, but rather than soaking into the wood, the contents transformed into a wash of blue flame that danced high across the surface for several seconds before dying out. The table below remained unharmed.
I glanced around the room, but other than a few people who gave us a cursory glance, no one seemed all that interested in what had just happened.
“What the hell?” I said, surprised by the lack of reaction.
Caleb leaned in closer, and I noticed the vial in his hand as he discreetly slipped it back into his coat. “Are you still counting now?”
I switched my thoughts back over, finding the back of my mind a blank this time. “Shit,” I said.
“I thought as much,” he said. “I brought you here because you have to get us
ed to distractions, Alexandra. All these people, spilling my drink, the flames on the table . . . You need to keep focused no matter what is going on around you.”
“How is the counting supposed to help?” I said. “Why is it so damned important?”
“Let’s start simple,” he said. “I’m having you do it because that’s how you’re going to be able to fly with those wings you’re building. The better a rhythm you can keep—without distraction—the easier it’s going to be keeping yourself airborne. But the best reason you need to lock that rhythm off in the back of your mind is because the front of it is going to be occupied.”
“With what?”
“Capturing your gargoyle,” he said.
My heart caught in my throat. “Oh,” I said, stunned.
“You’re going to have your hands full,” he said. “The last thing I want you worrying about is staying in the air. You need to learn how to split your mind. I think that’s what’s been keeping you from moving further forward with your arcane endeavors.”
I cocked my head. “How do you know this?”
“That’s the other reason I brought you here,” he said. “When you look around this room, you just see a crowd of people.”
I looked around, really only seeing a bar filled with customers and nothing more. “Well, what do you see?”
Caleb raised his hand in a subtle manner and began pointing around the room at various tables. “Witch, witch, druid, warlock—”
“How can you tell?”
“It’s all in the details,” he said. “To be fair, I’ve worked with or for a bunch of them before. But the details are what you need to start focusing on. Look at the first woman I pointed at. That medallion around her neck is a Wiccan symbol. The man across from her has a Green Man tattoo on his forearm, so I’m going with druid for him. That guy who just walked by you, the one in the knee-length leather coat—it caught on one of the chairs, and he had some kind of shiny, retractable bat hanging from his belt inside it. Probably silver.”
I followed the movement of the man Caleb had just mentioned. “He looks familiar,” I said. “I think he used to come in the Lovecraft Café all the time when I was still working there.”
“Eccentric Circles attracts a certain type of crowd,” Caleb said.
“Eccentrics,” I said with a smile. “You sure this isn’t a date?”
“Paranormals,” he corrected. “Focus. It would serve you to learn your own kind.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the crowd all around us. “It’s a lot to take in. The counting, finding a whole bar filled with our kind of people. It’s distracting.”
“Perhaps too distracting,” he said, standing. He gestured toward the front of the bar. “Come on.”
I stood, still marveling at the crowd. “Where are we going?”
“Back to your place,” he said.
“Cheeky!”
“Still not a date,” he said. “Trust me. I just need somewhere where we can concentrate. And maybe try a little practical magic.”
• • •
Caleb refused to talk to me until he had me back at the Gramercy Belarus Building and had helped settle the stone wings I had been constructing on my shoulders.
“I still don’t see how going to the bar is supposed to help with all this,” I said, adjusting my balance so I wouldn’t fall over from their weight. “What’s that got to do with my learning to fly?”
“Tonight was bigger than just flying, Alexandra,” he said. “It’s about why you’ve been having trouble with the higher abilities you’ve been toying with as a Spellmason.”
As he led me across the broken library out onto the terrace, I asked, “How so?”
“I’ve been asking some questions here and there,” he said, ducking my wings through the hole where the French doors used to hang. “There’s one thing most of the practitioners back in Eccentric Circles have in common. All of them possess an ability to split their mind, which I don’t think is something I’ve seen mentioned in what you’ve shown me on Spellmasonry.”
“And that’s helpful how?”
“You spend your time trying to bring stone to life with your main focus,” he said, pulling out a vial of Kimiya and rubbing it along the top edge of the wings, “but I think your arcane discipline demands you hold focus on several things at once. You have to be able to split that focus several different ways. It’s not enough just to control stone; you also have to be able to finesse it in other ways. Bringing you someplace with a lot to concentrate on hopefully loosened you up to that a bit. At the very least, it should have helped you a bit with focusing your back mind on counting. Which is what I want to test now.” He checked the inside lining of his coat. “I’m really starting to run low on the Kimiya. And my reverse engineering it is still likely to blow us both up, so that’s still an issue, but right now we need to do two things: First, you need to practice with these wings.”
“How?”
“By flying,” he said.
I laughed, nerves behind it all. “Are you serious? Now?”
“No time like the present,” he said with a smile.
“And what will you be doing?” I asked.
“Watching you,” he said, “and also thinking about the second part of my plan for your flight. I have to come up with the best way to capture Stanis.”
My stomach sank, knotting up. “So I’m . . . what? Bait?”
“That’s such an ugly word,” he said, pulling out his notebook and beginning to scribble in it. “I prefer to think of you as . . . motivational material.”
No matter what Caleb called it, I still felt like a worm ready to be put on the end of the line. Still, I hated to be defeatist. Maybe I could keep myself in the air. Sure, failure was an option, but so was success.
I stood there, the wings feeling all the heavier now that we had moved out into the wind on the terrace. “So what do I do?”
“I want you to concentrate on bringing the stone to life, then using that rhythmic count, keeping it in time and using the tempo to lift yourself off the terrace.”
I gave a grim smile. “You make it sound so simple,” I said. “Dying is simple, too.”
“Just go up a few feet and hold your position,” he said. “We just need a proof of concept, not breaking the sound barrier or anything.”
“Right,” I said, and pushed images of my falling out of the night sky from my mind. I pressed my power out into the wings, grinding them to life as my connect set in. With the memory of Rory’s Swan Lake audition piece in mind from our youth, I forced the wings into a quick and fluid pattern. Ignoring the press of their physical weight against my body, I pressed them harder and harder as I quickened my count. When my feet left the stone of the terrace, I pushed the count to the back of my mind, rising several feet into the air.
“I’m doing it,” I said, unable to suppress a giddy laugh. “I’m actually doing it.”
“Okay,” Caleb said, looking up from his notes. “Now tell me about the people back at the bar.”
I wavered in the air as my wings fell out of rhythm. “What? I’m flying!”
“Just do it!” he shouted with such force, I almost lost my rhythm again and banked closer to the edge of the terrace, veering toward the alley but pulling myself back up in time.
“You don’t have to be so mean,” I muttered.
“I’m not,” he said, lowering his notebook but not really softening, “but if you can’t do two things at once, or deal with a little surprise, then you might as well let Stanis tear you apart right now because that’s what he’ll do.”
“I’m not going to have to outfly him, am I?” I said, counting. Always counting. “He’s got centuries of practice.”
“And you’ve got now,” he said. “So I suggest you work at it. And no, you won’t have to outfly him. At lea
st, not for too long, anyway.”
“Because you’re going to capture him,” I said. “How?”
Caleb held up his notebook, waving it at me. “I’m working on it,” he said. “But by rough calculations, we may exhaust what remains of both our Kimiya supplies. Unless you want to try my home brew again, but that still has a 70 percent chance of blowing us up.”
All of the remaining Kimiya? “What do you have planned?” I asked.
“You work on your part, and I’ll work on mine,” he said. “Now, tell me about the people you saw at the bar.”
I thought back on earlier that evening, this time my wings staying at a constant rate, holding me in place about ten feet over the terrace. Now I needed to work on splitting my mind to recall the people in the crowd, not to mention that it was already splitting away wondering how we were going to deal with the Kimiya shortage . . . My wings wavered but I refocused my efforts, hoping this would help when it came to flying against Stanis once Caleb’s plan was ready.
“The warlock with the Green Man tattoo,” I started, holding my position in the air, “the guy with the retractable bat sticking out of his leather coat . . .”
Sixteen
Alexandra
The next morning, my knees were sore from landing hard on the stone terrace during our flight testing, so I slept in before hobbling downtown to the Libra Concordia in the old, abandoned church across from Trinity Church in the hopes of finding more information on either Kimiya production or this splitting of the mind Caleb was so keen on talking about.
Pleased with the angel-specific distractions I fed him, Desmond Locke had made good on his promise and granted Marshall and Rory access to the research room at the Libra Concordia. My friends’ help in sorting through the books made the going much quicker, even despite their constant questioning. If there was information on how to master the production of Kimiya in what the Libra Concordia had on hand in their archives, we would find it. That was, if I could concentrate, what with Desmond Locke poking his head into the research room every half hour or so.
