“Grow up, Diggory.” Astra, to his left.
“This isn’t fair,” Diggory said.
“I know you’re awake, Julian,” Astra said. “I heard the change in your breathing.”
“I thought you might have,” Julian said. He lifted his head. She stood in front of him, close enough that he had to tilt his head back. “Is that all you got then, before the Covenant ruined things? A heightened sense of hearing?”
They had him in the living room of a loft apartment in what he hoped was London. The space was open-plan, long and narrow, with a slanted roof overhead. Sofas were positioned to his right, their brown vinyl surfaces old and cracked, facing a flatscreen TV. The space became a kitchen to his left, its surfaces piled with unwashed dishes, its cupboards the marks of greasy fingers around the door handles. Whatever other rooms the apartment had were off down a passageway beside the kitchen.
In front of him, behind Astra, was a small wooden cabinet missing one door. Envelopes, flyers and brochures in plastic wrapping, the kind of mail for previous tenants that accumulated in rental accommodation, were piled on top of the cabinet. On a corkboard above it, photos had been fastened with cheap, coloured pushpins. Two young men recurred, usually with drinks, sometimes with arms around different girls, though never the same girls from picture to picture. The distant noises of the city came mostly from the windows down the far end of the loft space, beyond the sofas.
In the cabinet, their spines towards him, placed on top of a stack of magazines with what he thought was an atrocious lack of respect, were two books of magic. Voices from Beyond the Veil was a nineteenth-century translation of a fifteenth-century French book, itself collated from knowledge collected from locals by explorers in West Africa. Incorporeal Anatomy had a more obscure history. Allegedly it had been written by an American submarine crewman after it returned from a patrol beneath the Antarctic ice shelves in the early seventies. Copies had begun circulating through certain book stores in the eighties. No record of the supposed submariner existed.
A guy in his early twenties with a narrow beard shaped to a point – one of the two from the corkboard photos – knelt beside a coffee table between the sofas and the TV. Julian’s satchel was on the table and most of its contents were on the floor around it. Tom Calder hulked behind him, holding Julian’s gun in one large hand. The last person in the room was also displayed on the corkboard. Short and wiry, with the nervous air of a small dog, both he and the guy emptying Julian’s satchel wore dark robes over their jackets and jeans.
Astra lifted Julian’s sword and brought the point to his chin.
“You shouldn’t have touched the sword,” he said.
She was enjoying herself. “Why not?”
“You’ll have nightmares.”
Astra shrugged. “This is an amazing device. It’s like the gemstones on witch rings, but it’s an entire sword. Did you steal it from Storage in Murdoch House?”
Trying to make him wonder what she knew, he guessed. “No, I came by the sword after that.”
“Hm.” She spun it through the air – with the care of one aware of her inexperience, he noted, but she moved it fast and kept it under control. “Do you know what I want, Julian?”
“The wrong thing.”
She stepped in front of him and rested the tip of the sword on the chair seat between his legs. “World peace.”
“And I thought your plan was crazy before.”
“You don’t know anything,” Diggory sneered. He was the short wiry one.
“Diggory.” Just as in Iceland, she only had to harden her tone and Diggory backed down. She returned her attention to Julian. “I thought you were the enemy, but the way you knocked down those stuffy old warlocks on the Council?” She made a big show of shivering. “It gave me goosebumps. I’ve had a rethink.”
“I’ve gone to rather a lot of effort,” Julian said, “to stop other people from doing what you’re trying to do.” Liam, the one pulling things out of his satchel, had begun working Julian’s gauntlet over his hand.
“That power belongs to us,” Astra said. She swept the sword behind her back. “It’s what we were made from. It’s what will complete us.”
“You’ll burn the world down,” Julian said. She held his sword in just the right position to bring it around and chop off his head.
She bent closer. He could feel her breath on his skin. Her eyes were the clearest blue he had ever seen. “You made a good start on that yourself tonight. The repercussions of what you’ve done? Tomorrow night, our world will be at war. With this power we can rule the shadow world, Julian. We can end all this self-destructive in-fighting. We can protect ourselves from all those who would persecute and destroy us.”
“If you’re about to kiss me,” he said, “I should warn you that my girlfriend will rip you into so many pieces they’ll never find them all.”
Astra straightened. The warm intimacy she’d tried to project slid off her face like a discarded mask. “You know the power I can already call. If you Blackwoods are even half as clever as you like everyone to think, you know what will be left of your mind after I rip out the knowledge I want.”
By the coffee table, Liam had managed to pull Julian’s gauntlet on. He muttered at it as he tried to make it work.
Julian spoke a single word.
Electricity spat from the gauntlet’s emitter ring and wrapped around Liam’s hand. He screamed and flew backwards. The living room filled with the stench of cooking human flesh.
Diggory yelped and sprang past Julian towards the kitchen. Tom lumbered forward and tried to wrench the gauntlet from Liam’s hand. He got a shock for his trouble. Liam fell to the floor, spasming as electricity ran through him. Scorch marks spread across the wooden floor wherever Liam’s body touched it.
The power in the gem discharged. Liam kept twitching. Julian wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead.
Tom swore as he kept getting shocks from trying to touch Liam. In the end he kicked Liam in the side. When Liam didn’t respond, he raised the gun towards Julian’s head. His hand shook and Julian knew he was heartbeats from losing control to the change.
“Would you like to find out how the gun is trapped?” Julian asked.
“Enough,” Astra snapped. She hadn’t moved.
Tom lowered the gun, still trembling.
“The hard way then,” Astra said. She closed her hand around the blade of his sword and squeezed. Her blood ran down the translucent crystal. “Tom, call him. Tom.”
With a last shudder, Tom shifted the gun to his left hand. He took out his phone and made a call. “She wants it now.”
Julian sensed the magic called into the room. In through the spatter of blood on the floor, to spiral upwards through Astra, into the space around her.
Behind Astra, the ghost of the wizard began to appear.
If Jacob was surprised by the group that teleported into his hospital bedroom, he had covered that reaction by the time Fiona could see again after the blinding white of the teleport.
“Couldn’t you have waited five more minutes?” he asked. “I’m in the middle of dessert.” He held the handle of a spoon like he had paws instead of hands. A bowl of pie and custard rested on the wheeled table in front of him and he hunched over it like an old man reading without his glasses. He dropped the spoon and sat back against his pillows. “Still, nice to see you again, Fiona.”
He ignored everyone else, as if she’d come alone instead of with Rob, Alice, Jessica and her automatons. To her great annoyance, a blush began to creep up her neck.
Alice grabbed the table and flung it away. It left the floor, crashed against the wall and spilled the remains of Jacob’s dinner on the disinfected floor.
“It might be best if you didn’t carry on like you’re wearing cool shades instead of a hospital gown,” Fiona said. “My monster friends are a little tense.”
“Not even the right time of the month for either of them,” Jacob said.
Rob let out a d
eep, rumbling growl.
Fiona sighed. He was going to be like that then. “Julian’s been kidnapped. Taken by teleport magic. We need your help to find him, or to find a girl named Kate.” She explained who Kate was.
“Your finder is the better bet,” Jacob said. “My eyes are CCTV cameras. If your kidnappers are teleporting, they aren’t passing under them.” How he kept his composure with Alice hissing under her breath at his side, with the lines of her face growing too sharp, Fiona didn’t know.
“So you are tracking her,” Fiona said. “Alice thought you might be.”
“I tracked all the Bromley-by-Bow survivors,” Jacob said. “Kate’s barely scraping by. I’m sure I’ll need a finder myself once I’m in business again. She’ll be cheap.”
Fiona folded her arms across her chest. “Is that the only reason? Not because she was on Mitch’s side and you two used to be such good friends?”
Jacob’s eyes turned to flint.
“Boy,” Jessica said from where she sat on Mr Shell’s back. “Don’t tell me I have to be the responsible adult here.”
Fiona shook her head. “Will you help us or not, Jacob?”
“Who took him?”
Rob explained about Astra and Crispin. Jacob forgot his anger at that. One hand went to the tablet computer at his side.
“What’s in it for me?” he asked.
“He’s your friend,” Alice said. The words came out mushy. Her teeth were all the wrong shapes.
“You know better than that,” he replied.
Fiona saw it then, in the look that passed between them. They’d been together once. She wondered what Julian had to do with their breakup and how much harder that would make dealing with Jacob. “What do you want, Jacob?”
“What are they all after?” he asked. “What is Julian protecting? That’s what I want.”
For the first time, Fiona wondered that too. She wondered if there wasn’t good reason for keeping Julian’s secret from Jacob.
But she wasn’t going to let Julian die for it.
“Rob, tell him.”
Rob’s lips peeled back from his teeth. “I’m trying to decide if Julian didn’t tell the snake here because he was being his usual stupid self or because he was being smart.”
“Just tell him, Rob. Every minute counts.”
He told what he knew. It wasn’t much.
“The power that burned the world twice?” Jacob repeated. “He said that?”
“Does that mean something?” Fiona asked.
“No,” Jacob said, then looked like he regretted the slip. “Everyone but Alice wait out in the corridor for a minute.”
“Have you noticed the length of Alice’s teeth right now?” Fiona asked.
Jacob lifted one hand and tried to close it into a fist. The fingers didn’t curl up all the way. “She can still manage to help me with the buttons. This is my price. I come too.”
Fiona shook her head. “If you fall behind, we leave you for the werewolves or the vampires to scoop up. Come on guys.”
She took up position in the hallway, arms still folded across her chest. Jessica peered around the hospital with interest. Rob chewed on his knuckle.
“That guy’s looking to score whatever we’re after for himself,” Mr Beak said. He had resumed his position on Mr Shell’s back, now that Jessica wasn’t sitting there.
Jessica shrugged. “If he tries anything, we zap him.”
“I will be ready, Miss Jessica,” Mr Shell said.
“Rob, you’re making me dizzy,” Fiona said.
He stopped pacing. “That bastard in there tried to kill us.” He spoke with a heavy growl. “Oh yeah, I forgot. Remember how I sent you that message about watching out for wizards? Savraith had two buddies. Julian thinks having Savraith’s ghost floating about might bring another one of them sniffing around. Keep an eye out for wizards.”
Rob went back to chewing his knuckle, oblivious. Fiona remembered beating her fists against her shadow on the ground, while Sorcha watched as though counting each blow.
“Thanks,” she said. “I will.”
In a place where everything had two shadows, Julian ran down a crumbling promenade of moss-covered stones. The remnants of human-sized statues lined the promenade. Those that still had faces had been smoothed blank by aeons of whispering winds. Behind him, by a great lake across which another ruined city lay, two groups of night warriors revelled in the carnage they inflicted on one another.
He followed a glimpse of red cloth turning a corner. Followed the clink of an unsettled flagstone as it was dislodged by silent feet. Followed, when it was all he had, the taste of magic, electric on his tongue.
Sparks skittered around the emitter ring of the gauntlet on his left hand. His pistol was a metal weight in his right, the threads of his magic kindling fire in the chambered ammunition. The monsters behind him had their part to play. This was his.
He ducked through an archway, a curve of ancient stone made fragile without the wall that must once have run beside and above it. Beyond it lay a courtyard, its high walls casting strange shadows across the uneven cobblestones.
He thought his saw his enemy. For an instant, he did. The red cloak, the close-fitting armour. But the impression was gone before it could fully register. Instead, his gaze fell on a familiar face.
Her eyes were bright blue, like most of her kind. Her mane of hair was as pale as her skin. She was a ghost, standing in the shadows cast by the wall to Julian's right.
He froze. The sparks shooting from the emitter ring of his gauntlet hissed and died. He stared at her and spoke a name.
None of his weapons were pointed at her when she attacked.
“Not far enough back,” Astra said. “Further.”
He felt the great surge of muscle beneath him as his mount leapt from her perch. One beat of her wings and she had caught the air. They flew from the maw of the hangar and into a sky full of fire.
She turned. Julian lifted his left hand. An electro-lance was bound to it and his magic energised its tip. A bomb was strapped to his back. He glanced left and right, saw the rest of his wing taking up formation. The enemy’s forces swarmed in the sky between them and their target.
They began their attack run.
“Still not far enough,” Astra said. “You can scream you know. Diggory put a mute spell around the flat.”
Julian kept his head down as she knifed into his mind again.
He took the steps down one at a time, testing each as if expecting it to be a trap. His hand felt strange without his warlock ring.
The building was silent above him. He’d expected to be jumped there, but Mitch knew even without that, he would enter of his own free will. Below, Mitch waited. Julian was gambling he could turn the trap around on Mitch. Millions would die if he failed.
If he failed to kill his best friend.
He felt Astra drag her fingernails along his jaw. When she lifted his head, she was so close he breathed in what she breathed out.
“Closer,” Astra said. “Keep going.”
He couldn’t respond. His jaw was locked shut.
Astra moved her right hand. Savraith’s ghost cut into his mind again.
He had finished setting out the pages on which he’d drawn his precise mandalas. Small volcanic stones scavenged from the grave-site held each page down. Julian lifted his right hand and began the words of the ritual he’d prepared. The black ring on his finger throbbed with timeless power.
Beneath him, printed into the rock that had held them for tens of thousands of years before they were exhumed, were the residues of two dead immortals.
Kate wasn’t happy to see them.
She edged back from them on the pavement, as awkward as though she were on stilts. Her skin had an ugly pallor, like a disease ate away at her insides.
“You want my help?” Kate asked. “You want my help?”
They had her cornered outside the mobile phone shop where Jacob said she worked. Alice had moved out to
Kate’s flank to keep her from running and Rob loomed at Fiona’s back. Fiona didn’t think there was any real danger of Kate getting violent. She looked as though she’d snap her wrist if she slapped Fiona’s cheek.
“That’s right,” Fiona said. “We need your help finding our friend Julian.”
Kate flung a hand towards the phone shop. “Look what you’ve done to me. After Bromley, the Mandellans tossed me and my little sister out on the street. This was all I could get. The people who come in here are utter assholes.” She stalked closer on stiff legs. “I can barely keep a roof over our heads. My overdraft payments are killing me.”
Fiona had intended to be diplomatic. When she first saw Kate in the phone shop, saw the state of her, she had intended sympathy. It was getting harder to remember that. “At least you don’t have the deaths of millions on your conscience, Kate.”
“Fuck you,” Kate said. She stumbled back towards the door of the phone shop.
“You’re dying,” Jacob said.
His words brought her up short. She didn’t turn around, she just hunched her shoulders like she couldn’t stop shivering inside.
Jacob leaned against a streetlight, doing a good job of pretending he didn’t need it to help him balance. “It’s the connection to your dream avatar back in that prison. It’s been corrupted. That corruption is travelling down the link between you and burning you up like a fever.”
He should have kept going and offered to help her. He clearly understood what was wrong with her. When he didn’t, Fiona opened her mouth to say it for him. Then she had a better idea. “Julian could save you.”
Kate turned at last. Her mouth was a hard line.
Rob picked up the thread. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff Julian knows. He’s from the oldest of the old magic families. Fixing you up?” He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”
“So if I find him for you and you can’t save him, I’m still screwed?” Kate asked.
“You want back in, don’t you Kate?” Rob asked. He moved to stand at Fiona’s side and held out a hand, palm up. “You were running with the big dogs and then they kicked you out. Well hey, that’s Jacob Mandellan right there.”
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