Branwyn blinked and tried to refocus, but one of the windows of light rushed toward them. Once again she was yanked, despite already being loathsomely nestled against Severin’s arm. Then her feet touched the ground as afternoon light filled her vision.
They stood on an old road, facing a scrubby, debris-filled field. Forested mountains loomed in the distance, and there was a trickle of water from a culvert nearby. The sky was clear and blue, but Branwyn could smell lightning, and the faintest whiff of long-dead fires.
Rhianna gracefully twirled away from Severin. “Huh. That wasn’t nearly as smooth as my Advisor’s travel.”
Branwyn, far less elegant, tried to jerk herself away from Severin. He let her step away from his chest but his hand continued to clasp hers as he said, “Well, you don’t belong to me like you belong to him.”
Rhianna turned a sunny smile on him as she took another step away. “And thank God for that, don’t you think?”
Severin smiled back as if he was oblivious to Branwyn spasmodically driving her nails into his palm. “Does he take you inside him often?”
Rhianna pivoted to scan the field before saying, “That sounds so naughty. Oh, that must be the investigator’s camp. We might as well start there.” She set off across what had to be the ruined town, following the cracked pavement.
Branwyn stared at her sister’s back and forced her fists to unclench. If her sister ‘belonged’ to the angel Umbriel in any way, she’d chosen it herself. Probably. Almost certainly. People were entitled to make their own choices even if Branwyn hated some of them.
She only realized when he moved into her line of sight that Severin had released her. “Any time you’d like to murder an angel, cupcake, just say the word.”
“Oh, and…” He held up the hand she’d been gripping, showing the blood welling from three crescent punctures. “Next time you make me bleed, I’ll expect you to kiss it and make it better.”
Branwyn refocused her rage and frustration from Umbriel to Severin. “You’re the one who wouldn’t let go of my hand. You got what you deserved.”
He looked at her for a long moment, his dark eyes fathomless but not swallowing her down as they so easily could. “I hope Umbriel knows what a distraction you are,” he finally said softly.
“Hey! Are you two coming or what?” Rhianna shouted.
Branwyn shook herself and plunged past Severin, leaving him to follow behind her or not. She’d come here to help find some missing kids. Everything else was irrelevant.
The ‘field’ was easily visible as a ruined town as soon as she paid a bit more attention. In the year or so since the fire, hardy vegetation had taken root here and there. Nobody had done anything to clean up the remnants of the structures, although there was evidence they’d been moved around. Bricks and roofing tiles and melted metal were piled haphazardly in the street. Vehicles burned almost beyond recognition collapsed on themselves. In the distance, beyond the cluster of tents Rhianna was exploring, there was a bulldozer.
On one level, the ruins reminded her of the beginnings of the recycled art she worked on before she’d learned artificing. She absently wondered if she could make something new from it, if the foundations of the town created a matrix she could rebuild on.
Then she realized why there were piles of debris in the road and pulled back hard on creative musings. Rhianna had said four hundred people had died here a year ago. And she’d been considering inspecting the ruins with her magical Sight, letting herself think of it as nothing more than a potential art project.
Branwyn wasn’t the only magically-endowed person in her family these days. Her middle sister Brynn was the Master of Horses for the Wild Hunt, a group sort of like the Ghostbusters. It was irritating to admit it, but she knew things now that Branwyn didn’t, and sometimes she shared them.
Recently she’d warned Branwyn against close study of the sites of recent violent deaths. Shuddering before a family dinner after a Wild Hunt gig, she’d said, “I don’t know if it’ll hit you like it hits me, but… it’s not something you want to stumble into accidentally. Sometimes there’s nothing, if the soul moves on cleanly. Sometimes… just be careful, okay?”
Branwyn remembered that, remembered the people who had died, and pushed away her desire to create, or even evaluate creatively.
“Branwyn?” said Rhianna, approaching her. “Are you all right? Where did your monster go?”
“Please don’t call him my monster.” Branwyn looked around, but sure enough, he’d vanished.
To her surprise, Rhianna blushed, something she normally only did when she revealed something secret about herself. “Sorry. I won’t do it again. Has he abandoned us?”
Branwyn sighed. “We can only dream.”
“Because if so, it’ll make getting home harder. I doubt ridesharing comes out this far.”
Branwyn shook her head, thinking of her own Veil-tearing charm, and all the wizards she knew. “I'm not worried about that. Look, where are those investigators you mentioned?”
Rhianna said, “It's just the investigators’ campsite. There aren’t any people. All the investigators assigned here keep quitting.”
“Have they all been ordinary investigators? That is, conventionally trained, without magic?”
“As far as I know.” Rhianna turned, and they walked over to the cluster of tents together. “There’s more camping supplies inside the tents.”
“How about a journal they left behind meticulously documenting their descent into madness?”
“Oh, only one of them quit because of mental health reasons. Another one broke his leg, and his partner developed some sort of lung disease. And the last one didn't say anything about Tucker but he got himself reassigned pretty quickly.” Rhianna pulled a camp stove out of one tent.
Branwyn peeked into another, spotted a folded camp chair and dragged it out. After unfolding it and dropping into it, she stared off over the ruins, thinking about Rhianna’s news. “Well, that certainly sends a message. I wonder who’s sending it.”
“A faerie,” said Severin, stepping out of the air between Branwyn and Rhianna. He was frowning and holding Branwyn’s hammer loosely in his left hand.
“Hey! Give me that.” Branwyn grabbed her hammer’s handle. He released it without argument or acknowledgement, and she pulled it into her lap, wondering why he’d fetched it. She’d left it behind, true, but only because she was pretty sure she could fetch it herself anytime she needed it.
“I’ve been looking around the Backworld here. There’s active faerie glamour all over the place. And something else, too.”
“Ooh, ooh, what?” asked Rhianna.
Severin bared his teeth. “I don’t know. And I don’t like that.”
“You said back in my studio that a faerie wiped out the town,” Branwyn said. “Is it more than that?”
“Yes.” Severin looked down at her. “You’re probably going to need that hammer, cupcake. Whatever happened here isn’t over yet.”
Branwyn tapped her fingers on her hammer’s head. “It’s not a weapon.” Severin only shrugged in response.
Rhianna clapped her hands together like a kindergarten teacher. “All right. Let’s start by looking around. Severin, you can figure out what’s going on in the Backworld while Branwyn and I go over the ruins. Later, we can see if any of the neighbors are still around.”
Severin gave her a chilly glance. “I am not going to be ordered around by an overconfident angel’s pet.”
“No, no, of course you won't,” said Rhianna soothingly. “You’re going to do that because you feel like it, not because I’m the boss of you. See, I understand. Branwyn is my sister.”
Severin’s little appreciative smile flickered on and off. “And don’t you forget it.” He vanished.
Branwyn stood up quickly. “What did you say about neighbors?”
Rhianna exhaled slowly, her gaze still focused on where Severin had been. “Neighbors… oh, right. The fire stopped at the town limits. Th
ere are, or possibly were, people living beyond them. They’re the ones who originally described the ‘fire tornado’. But they live out a couple miles in various directions, so let’s see what we can learn here first.”
2
Tucker
Rhianna and Branwyn picked their way through the ruins together. After a time, Rhianna asked, “Do you need to call anybody? We left so quickly and I don’t know if Mr. Congeniality will get you back by curfew.”
Branwyn shrugged. “Mom doesn’t expect me for dinner until next week, and Marley and her entire entourage are off on a private island somewhere in the Caribbean. You’re lucky I’m not with them.”
Rhianna raised her eyebrows. “You were invited?”
Branwyn rolled her eyes. “Oh yes. I do mean ‘entire entourage’. The cat, Marley’s family, me, and Penny. Zachariah also invited a friend of the twins, along with his mom. I think, if I’d asked, he would have flown our family out there too.”
“It must be so nice to be rich,” said Rhianna wistfully.
Branwyn stopped to inspect a solitary rosebush. It had somehow survived the flames that consumed the ranch house behind it. Now it was twisted and thirsty, with only a few leaves lingering in the heat of summer. “You’re in the wrong career if you want money.”
“I was doing all right before… well, never mind that. I was doing all right, but not ‘private island’ all right.” They walked on. “Did Corbin go too? How are he and Marley doing?”
“Yeah, see, that’s the main reason I didn’t go. Corbin and Marley are great. Marley and her boss Zachariah are all right, even if Zachariah is an authoritarian asshole. But Corbin and Zachariah together put my teeth on edge. They snipe at each other. They can’t seem to stay away from each other. There’s all this drama throbbing under the surface.” Branwyn flexed her fingers. “If I was trapped on a tiny island with them, I’d just end up getting out my chisel.”
“And then the island would explode,” Rhianna guessed. “Probably a good decision.”
They walked along in silence until they reached what had been the center of town. Rhianna raised her eyebrows at Branwyn, who said, “Let’s keep walking. To the other side, and then we can do a perimeter circuit.”
“Just like old times,” Rhianna said, and started walking again.
They used to go on long strolls when they’d been teenagers, exploring some new part of Los Angeles. Branwyn didn’t have the investigative training to pick any details out of the overall mess of Tucker, but exploring was an important first step in figuring out what to do next.
On those teenage rambles, she’d discovered she could learn more about a place by focusing on a single element than by trying to take in everything. The graffiti, or the trash receptacles, or the parked cars. This time, she noticed the plants.
As they finished their silent circuit, she said, “The roses survived the fire somehow, but they’re not surviving the summer heat. I’ll have to get them water from that creek I heard.”
“Oh?” said Rhianna. “Since when did you have a green thumb?”
When Branwyn just shrugged, Rhianna added. “I noticed the roads. They’re in terrible condition.” She nibbled on her lower lip. “Which fits. This really was an isolated town. Not just geographically, but politically. They didn’t ask for much from the state, and any services they could manage themselves, they did.”
Branwyn looked around at the burnt foundations and resisted any snarky remarks about Rhianna doing her research. Of course she had. In her situation, Branwyn would have too. “Any idea why a faerie might have hated this town in particular?”
“We don’t know anything,” said Rhianna cautiously. “I’m not sure I should contaminate your opinions this early.”
Branwyn’s brows drew together. In theory, she appreciated this kind of evidence-based approach to judgement, especially from a government agent. But it was unlike her whimsical sister.
Severin stepped out of thin air once again. “Have you spotted the glamour yet?”
“No?” said Rhianna. “Ooh, what did you find?”
“Take another walk, and this time don’t be fooled,” he responded, and vanished.
Rhianna pursed her lips, staring at where he’d been. “I’m not entirely sure I like him.”
“Good,” said Branwyn, and started retracing their route.
Rhianna jogged after her. “You say that, but suddenly you’re doing what he says.”
“I’ve decided not to be petty right now. He knows something, and he wants us to find out what it is.”
Rhianna looked askance at her, but all she said was, “I do wish they wouldn’t do that. My Advisor loves making me dig up information he already knows.”
“Aren’t you doing the exact same thing by not telling me what you know about this place?” Branwyn pointed out. “Except I have no way to dig up anything about this town, except maybe with an actual shovel.”
“That’s true.” Rhianna blew out her breath. “Well, this may or may not be relevant, but Tucker was an extremely homogenous town. 98% white at the last census. One post office. One school. One bowling alley. One bar, which was incidentally also the bowling alley.” She paused as Branwyn shrugged. It sounded exactly like she imagined a tiny town in Idaho would be. “One church.”
That made Branwyn raise her eyebrows. “Not very religious? I’d expect more bars then.”
“Well, it’s hard to say now, but it was a big building, with several full-time employees.” Rhianna scuffed her feet in the dirt. “There have been problems elsewhere stemming from isolationist communities clashing against the Extraworlder phenomenon.”
Extraworlder: the term used for the faeries by those who disliked the original word. The faeries themselves had gleefully embraced it, holding Extraworlder conferences and starting Extraworlder businesses and sending an Extraworlder lobby to DC. Branwyn preferred the old term.
Eventually, Branwyn said, “That’s interesting but I don’t know that it explains anything. Unless some of these other isolationist communities have also been going up in flames.”
“No,” said Rhianna. “Not that, although the faeries have certainly caused other kinds of trouble. But this was… destruction, not mischief.”
“Except that seventy kids escaped somehow. Speaking of which, have you noticed any of this glamour yet?”
Rhianna shook her head. “I don’t even know where to start. I was really hoping you did.”
Branwyn grimaced, contemplating her options for not being ‘fooled’. The Sight, which her sister Brynn had warned her not to use at the sites of catastrophes, would show her the lines of the Geometry that underlaid everything, along with the auras of any celestials around. That didn’t help with glamour, though, because faerie magic convinced the world to lie to itself.
On the other hand, a while back she’d made a deal to share her eyesight with a Faerie Queen. Other than letting her escape with her life, it had never been the slightest bit useful to her. She wondered if it might be now. Could the Queen of Stone understand the same visual data differently? And if so, how would Branwyn know? It had always been, as far as she could tell, a one-way stream. But who really knew? She’d stay alert, just in case the Queen was watching and felt like making a contribution.
Concentrating on trying to see what might be hidden, she walked along, only paying half attention Rhianna’s grumbling about celestials who wouldn’t just spill the beans. When Branwyn finally did notice something strange, she stopped dead and Rhianna bumped into her back.
“What?” said Rhianna. She glanced around and said, “Look at that pothole. It needs a bridge.”
“Let’s go get some water,” Branwyn said, staring hard at the wilting rose bush growing in front of the entrance to a burned-out house right at the edge of town.
“Whaaat did you see?” wailed Rhianna. “Don’t you dare do this, Branwyn Lennox. I will beat you.”
“Catch me first,” Branwyn suggested, and took off running back through the tow
n.
Branwyn wasn’t in terrible shape. She walked a lot, and some of her work required wrestling with bulky or recalcitrant materials for long hours. But Rhianna trained daily, and long gone were the days when Branwyn’s longer legs made up for her sister’s explosive energy. After only a moment of shocked outrage, Rhianna caught up with Branwyn and passed her, slowing down just enough to give her sister a disgusted look. Then she sped past, running like a nymph.
Having achieved her primary goal of buying time to consider what she’d spotted, Branwyn was tempted to drop to a brisk walk again. But her pride made her keep running, even when she began to puff.
By the time she arrived at the investigator’s camp, Rhianna had four buckets filled and waiting beside the culvert that flowed under the road. As Branwyn staggered up to her, she impassively picked up one of the buckets and sloshed the contents onto her sister. “There, I beat you. Now tell me what’s going on.”
Branwyn, who had expected and even hoped for the drenching, wiped water from her face. “The rose was growing in the wrong place. It stood out. I thought we might as well water it and some of the other ones while I figured out why.”
Rhianna stared at her expressionlessly for a moment, then filled up the newly emptied bucket and handed it to Branwyn. Then she picked up two more. “All right. Let’s do this.”
Self-consciously, Branwyn grabbed the fourth bucket. Once upon a time, she would have refused to give such a fuzzy answer. Once upon a time, Rhianna wouldn’t have accepted it if she had. They’d both changed.
“Do you think the monster could have magicked this water to the plants?” asked Rhianna after a few minutes, a little wistfully.
Branwyn resisted her first reaction and actually thought about the question. Eventually, she said, “I don’t know. Carried it faster without spilling it because he’s stupidly strong and fast? Probably. Done it without muscle? I’ve never seen him create anything.” She remembered shattered glass fusing into a molten ball over his palm and corrected herself. “Not from scratch.”
Fury Convergence Page 2
