She smiled wickedly, and then crossed her legs. “You don’t get to stare at my toys anymore,” she teased.
I rolled my eyes. “Didn’t you just say you get to stare at my toys?” I pointed out.
“Of course,” she said, waving a hand as she scanned her screens briefly. Then she looked up. “Like my new tech?” she asked.
“Looks complicated.”
She shrugged. “To a caveman, maybe. But I am Othello.”
She said this in a tone that would have justified saying GOD.
I grinned, sitting down in one of the chairs before the desk. “It’s come to my attention that you have effectively evicted me from my office.”
“You were never fit for an office.”
“That’s true,” I admitted. She was right. I was a field guy, not one to be kept sequestered. And I didn’t follow orders too well. It was in my blood. “How’s Plato’s Cave?”
She waved a hand. “Sales are up.”
I stared at her. “Aren’t you supposed to be, you know, running the place for me?”
“What do you think I’m doing?” she frowned, pointing at the monitors on the desk. “Expenses are down. Sales are up. People like the griffin… animatronics you built to walk around the store and play with children.”
I smiled, pleased with myself. Othello shot me a very warm smile. They weren’t animatronics, but Guardians, like the ones protecting Chateau Falco. Full-sized griffin statues that were technically alive, or at least sentient. I had sent some over to Plato’s Cave to keep the store – and the patrons inside – safe in case anyone decided to attack.
“Thanks. I don’t know how you do it, but—”
“Stop. Repeat that last part.”
“But,” I said, deadpan. She scowled, waiting. I sighed. “Fine. I don’t know—”
“There she is. That’s all I needed to hear. You admitting your weaknesses. Feels good to be humble, doesn’t it?”
“Only when someone points it out. Often. I think it’s the repetition that really makes it special.”
“Hemingway stopped by,” she said, studying my reaction, hands placed on the table.
I nodded. “Yeah, we talked. Kind of.”
She watched me. Because she was kind of dating Death, or Hemingway, as we called him when around others. It was funny to see such a cute pixie of a young woman dating a seemingly much older man, but she had been surprised when I had pestered her about it. Apparently, she saw someone entirely different. When I told her about the old man I knew as Hemingway, she had burst out laughing, describing a much younger, muscular, dark-eyed, bad boy. We had even called him in to hear it. He simply smiled, not explaining.
Which meant he could look however the hell he wanted. The rat bastard.
I changed topics. “Any word from the London crew?”
She shook her head. “Nothing yet, but I haven’t heard from them in a week. I’ll give them a call. Also, Raego’s out on patrols for the rest of the day, so let me know if you need me to tell him anything. To look out for anyone in particular,” she added, hinting at Hercules.
“Alright. I need to take care of a few things before brunch.”
Her eyes sparkled, and she leaned forward eagerly. “Do we finally get to meet her?” she asked in the same tone as can I eat some of the candy in your pocket?
I rolled my eyes. “Relax. She’s just a friend.”
Othello leaned back, squinting suspiciously. “Hemingway tells a different story…”
“Yeah, well, Death fucking lies. He’s a lying, dirty liar who lies.”
She smirked. “Fine. Shoo, shoo. I’m trying to work here, Romeo.”
I muttered under my breath as I stood. “You really shouldn’t talk to your boss like that.”
She snorted. “I’m thinking about forming a Union.”
“You should read about how well that worked out for Robert E. Lee.”
“That was a Confederacy.”
“I know, but they’re really just different names for the same thing,” I said touching a handle on the fireplace. I was gone before she could respond, and found myself in a stone corridor. I cast a ball of pale white light before me and began to walk. Then I froze, staring at the light, feeling uneasy. I had meant that to be blue, not white. I shivered, the coin in my pocket feeling like a hunk of lead. I changed the light to blue fire, and continued on, pursing my lips.
The white color had been creeping into my magic lately. My spells, my whips, everything. And it had something to do with the Mask in my pocket. Then again, I had met another wizard with the same problem. And she wasn’t a Horseman. But she had other ties to the same management structure. Even if neither of us knew exactly what or how that was possible.
I slowed my breathing, forcing deeper pulls from my lungs, measured and relaxed. Satisfied, I finally rounded the corner to see a large wooden door before me. The Armory. It was carved in a nature-scape, complete with one large tree, a pond, tall grass, and other trees in the background. The carving was full of life as well – birds, fishlings, and even a wolf.
I cursed. The damned wolf was hiding behind the tree again, out of my reach. That pretty much gave me my answer. The birds flitted happily from branch to branch, and I watched as the fishlings darted back and forth in the pond.
Because the carving was alive. The leaves swayed back and forth as an unseen breeze moved them, and the creatures lived their lives in that wooden door as if it was their entire world. Which it was. I scowled at the wolf peeking out from behind the tree.
“Here, boy!” I cooed, but the wolf immediately ducked away again. “Goddamn it,” I cursed. The wolf was the key to the door. Petting his fur opened the door to the Armory.
Which meant that Pandora still wasn’t allowing visitors. Or, judging by Hercules’ recent fashion sense, she had gone Greek.
I might have lost my cool a bit, because I realized I was holding as much power as I could handle, and that my fists were crackling with blue energy. A bed of thorns surrounded my feet – long, twisting black barbs, inches long, and shining from the glow around my fists. The coin throbbed in my pocket, but I ignored it as I stared at the door.
The wolf whimpered behind the tree, but I ignored him, too. He was just doing his job.
I studied the door itself, and began to probe it with my power, searching for an opening. I had tried simply blasting it open in the past, but that hadn’t worked. Still, the surrounding stone walls were scorched from the explosion, now blackened with char around the pristine door.
I mentally dove deep into the grain of the wood, searching, questing, listening, seeing, like a thief picking a tumbler on a safe.
Strange magic danced around me, alien, yet distantly familiar. Like owning a dog, but never seeing a wolf before. This was in the same family as my domesticated pet, but wholly different.
Elements danced against my senses – whispering, arguing, fighting, shouting, attacking, welcoming, defending, pressing, relenting, overwhelming me – like an army of souls.
I gasped, stepping back as I suddenly noticed the sharp pain in my ears. I lifted a hand to touch one and it came away bloody. My vision swam for a moment, and pinpricks of light twinkled in my peripheral vision. I stared down at my fists, which were still crackling with blue light. Then I glanced down at the thorns to find them smoking, but they were longer than they had been a moment ago, in a thicker tangle, too. They didn’t touch me, the vines growing around my legs, but coming as close as possible to my flesh without actually making contact.
I frowned. I didn’t understand the thorns. They weren’t a conscious effort on my part, but I had seen them the last time I used the Mask in my pocket. I stared down at my fists again, and they suddenly flashed white, the blue vanishing as if it had never been.
And the door screamed in fury.
Not the door, but the magic living inside the wood.
The nest of thorns at my feet began to grow before my eyes, expanding into a wider circle, the barbs growing
thicker, sharper, longer, at least two feet tall, now.
I stared at the door’s surface, and the wolf howled in terror.
I pressed against the door again with my magic, this time white instead of blue, and the elements evaporated like smoke, as if I was probing an entirely normal door.
I pressed deeper, and found myself surrounded by darkness. Like velvet soaked in blood. A deep laugh echoed up from the depths of my mind, and my eyes began to throb as I pushed against the blackness. The laughter grew louder, and my eyes began to ache, not just throb. I felt blood dripping from my ears now, and finally pulled back with a gasp, panting.
The bed of thorns at my feet fairly smoldered now, smoking and stunted.
And I knew – somehow – that without that bed of thorns, I would have resembled them, my body smoking and charred. The thorns had protected me somehow. Not enough to prevent me from harm, as my eyes felt like they had just survived a long stint in a smoke-filled room, and my ears felt hot. I used the tail of my shirt to wipe the blood away, and stared down at my fingertips. The power was gone, and the tips of my fingernails were blackened and burned, although I felt no pain. At least it wasn’t my flesh. I stepped back, and the surviving thorns let me pass. I sat down with a groan, bone-weary. The thorns disintegrated into gray ashes, and I saw the wolf nervously watching me. The birds and fishes were watching me. I also saw an owl tucked away in the branches, watching me with too much understanding.
That tweaked my attention for some reason, but I felt numb.
The white magic had helped me get further into the door than ever before, and I knew I had been close, but it still wasn’t enough. Was it because I wasn’t fully accepting my mantle? If I indeed became a Horseman, would I have the strength to break such a strong, wild barrier of power? Or was it because of my unfulfilled promise with the cane? I weighed that in my mind, and decided that the tiny drain I had noticed wouldn’t have made a difference here.
I shook my head, glancing down at my watch. I had a few hours, and I still had something I wanted to take care of before brunch.
I groaned as I climbed to my feet, stumbling against the wall. My fingers gripped the charred stone as I steadied myself. Confident I wouldn’t fall on my face, I pushed off, glancing down at my fingertips. Black soot from the walls painted my fingertips.
I stumbled on through the hall, not even bothering with a light this time.
For some reason, I never found myself actually needing one. Perhaps I had been here often enough that I remembered the path without my sight. Like when you try to creep through your room at night as a teenager, trying to sneak out of the house. You know where everything is by memory and don’t need a light.
I found myself hoping Othello wasn’t in the office. She would take one look at me and call someone for help, and I didn’t have time for that.
I sat down in the middle of the darkened hall, right before the opening that would take me back to the office. If I reached out, I could touch the space that would Shadow Walk me there. I wondered if a reaching hand would be enough to transport me back.
Not wanting to risk it, I scooted back a foot instead, and closed my eyes, focusing on a very familiar place, and forcing the pains of my body deep down where they could be ignored for a short while.
Did I really want to go to this place?
Nope.
But I needed to. Before things got any worse.
Because if my past was any indication, worse was always on the dessert menu.
My soul exploded from my body like a phoenix rising from a pile of smoking ashes.
Chapter 11
I opened my eyes to see I was sitting on a white leather divan. One of those old school, gentleman’s club type pieces, freshly waxed with arrogance and elitism. I was holding a white martini glass with a white liquid inside. It looked like milk, but I could smell the alcohol.
Because everything was white here.
I stood, glancing down at my clothes. I wore a white seersucker suit. I held it up to the light spilling through a window to see that the stripes were neatly embroidered to say Team Temple in tiny silver letters, too small to see without leaning close – and the fact that the silver thread was on white fabric also made it difficult to read.
Still, I found myself grinning. I wore white boating shoes and white pants that matched my coat. I wore no shirt underneath, revealing my tanned, lightly furred chest. I blinked at that. No shirt?
But that was par for the course here. I walked over to the window and stared out at a white landscape of an immaculately maintained garden complete with white roses, white grass, and neatly manicured white shrubbery.
I blinked.
A silver peacock strutted along a path of white stone.
Silver. Not white.
I glanced up at the sky. Then out at the milky white sea beyond the grounds. Then back to the peacock. Another emerged from beyond a bush, fleeing from yet a third black peacock, his train flared out to show an impressive fan of black feathers with red orbs at the tips.
My heart might have skipped for a moment.
Just like Grimm, my unicorn.
Then the three birds were gone, and I heard the door clicking closed behind me. I hadn’t even heard it open. I turned to see Matthias, or as he had referred to himself for quite some time, the Mad Hatter.
He wore a white fedora, a crisp white dress shirt with a silver ascot, and white shorts. He was barefoot. I looked up to find him smiling at me, his ginger beard slightly obscuring the silver ascot. My eyes still latched onto it for a moment before finally rising to his eyes.
He nodded slowly, a faint smile on his face.
“Changes…” he said, waggling his fingers dramatically.
And I was suddenly very, very concerned.
He had been banished here – unjustly – to live in this white world by an enemy, a man named Castor Queen. Hundreds of years ago. They had formed the Syndicate together for all the right reasons, a check of power against the Academy – the ruling body of wizards. But when Matthias decided to hunt down the Brothers Grimm, his old pal Castor Queen framed him as collaborating with them while simultaneously recruiting the Brothers Grimm to work for him.
Matthias suffered the consequences, and was banished here to live in a white world, like the white hat philosophy he stoically defended – since he had stated that doing the right thing was paramount – being a white hat as opposed to a black hat – one who let the ends justify the means.
He had taken the fall, and survived the last few hundred years in this white realm. He had gone slightly insane during his captivity, and thanks to Death giving him a book to pass the time, had spent a good portion of his imprisonment actually believing he was the Mad Hatter.
So, was he insane?
Yep.
Was he dangerous?
Double yep. He was a Maker. A Tiny God. A Deus Ex Machina. One of the last. It meant he harbored a Beast, shared his body with it, and that Beast granted him the power to Make things. You might think being a Maker and a Wizard were the same, but I’ll rectify that really quick. A Maker was to a Wizard what a Wizard was to a non-magical being.
He could literally create things out of thin air just by believing in them. A wizard would have to use magic to decide which elements he needed to make each piece of something, and then use magic to assemble those pieces into the final product. But a Maker…
He just thought about what he wanted, and whammo. He had it.
Like he had done when he gave me my Mask for my birthday last year.
Since he was admittedly insane, and a Maker, you could say he was the equivalent of a leaky nuclear uranium core.
And I was sipping a martini with him.
Because, well, he was my ancestor. The last true Master of my home, Chateau Falco – which harbored a Beast of her own. The last time a Maker had decided to free his Beast, they had been forced to build my mansion around it in order to contain it – since that was the only non-living entity stro
ng enough to house a spell that could trap the Beast.
And I was here to…
Ask for my cane back. So that I could free my own Beast I had trapped inside it. Because I had very briefly been a Maker, too. But through circumstance and opportunity, I had been able to remove it from my soul, anchoring it inside my cane. But only after agreeing to let the Beast go free as soon as I had the chance. And since I hadn’t yet done so, my magic was now having hiccups. Warning hiccups.
Matthias had warned me that releasing my beast in near proximity to Chateau Falco – my home – could result in them mating, and producing a baby Beast. To be honest, even I had trouble wrapping my head around my reality sometimes.
But I had made a promise, and I had to live up to my word, or no more magic.
“How are things?” I asked lamely.
“Less white than usual,” he said with a lazy grin.
I swallowed. “Yeah. What gives?”
The Hatter leaned forward, a mad gleam in his eyes. “Like your jacket?”
“It’s very… elegant,” I offered.
“Arrogant, you mean,” he corrected.
I smiled. “That, too.”
“It’s how we Temples roll,” he said, leaning back slightly.
“Rule, you mean.”
It was his turn to smile. “That, too.”
We watched each other for a few moments. Then he finally spoke. “I smell madness.”
I blinked at him. Then I sniffed myself. “Pardon?”
He scratched his gnarly beard thoughtfully, as if weighing me with his eyes. “Maybe not madness, but a…” he waved his fingers in the air as if trying to grasp a feather. “Wildness, perhaps.” My drink splashed over the rim, and his eyes latched onto me with a predatory grin. “You’re finally doing it!” he whispered excitedly. “Good man!”
I carefully set my drink down. “Doing what?”
“Going on Walkabout. Tasting the wild. Feeding the soul. Quieting the mind. Quenching your instincts,” he said, patting his thigh excitedly.
“I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You received your Invitation! It took me a minute, but I recognize the smell. Death told me they had stopped Inviting us. For hundreds of years, now. But… you are no longer a Maker…” he leaned back in his chair, thinking. “That is most… unusual,” he said, idly stroking his beard. “But your life is forever about to change. The world will change colors. Your life will never be the same. Welcome to the… well, you’ll find out the name soon enough. No need to get ahead of ourselves. You have to survive first, after all. Now, what is it you wished to see me about?”
Wild Side: A Nate Temple Supernatural Thriller Book 7 (The Temple Chronicles) Page 6
