Katina leaned closer to him. “You scream like a girl,” she said.
Liam didn’t have a comeback for that. He simply stared at the spot on his hand.
The black spot that had been the tracker was gone.
Twenty-Two
Chicago, IL
Cyril knew the moment that the tracker on Liam went dead. He’d been sitting at his desk in a high-rise building in the center of the city, working at his computer when the snap of magic moved through him. Sleep wasn’t something he believed himself capable of, not in these final days with everything he’d worked so long for finally coming together. He was going on long hours, working on a mix of caffeine and magic to remove the need for sleep.
The sensation of the tracker being cut off from him wasn’t painful, just a rush of panic like when trying to catch a glass about to fall. The tracker had been his own spell, a proprietary piece of magic that he constructed. And now it was dead.
He stood up from his leather-backed seat and turned to stare out the window at the twinkling lights of the Loop and beyond. His fists were clenched.
“Who’s helping you?” Cyril whispered out into dawn just starting to stretch across the sky.
This was a setback, to be sure, but a relatively minor one. Cyril turned from the expansive window, the window that made it seem as if he stood on the edge of the world. In effect, he did. This was a world on the precipice, teetering on the head of a pin, about to fall to oblivion.
It was a world about to achieve balance again.
For too long, this world suffered without a vital resource, one that had been present here long ago. Global warming was a real threat. The oceans threatened to rise due to the melting of the ice caps. The environmental scientists liked to blame this phenomenon on excess carbon in the atmosphere from too long a reliance on fossil fuels. And they weren’t wrong. Despite all the politicians wrangling all over one another in an attempt to mislead a wide-eyed yet wholly imperceptive public that it was all a hoax, it was an incontrovertible truth that the world was tumbling headlong toward destruction.
But the environmental scientists were operating on an incomplete picture.
When humanity sticks its fingers into an ecosystem to change things to better suit them, the balance is tipped from a perfect symbiotic system to a system weighed ever so slightly toward chaos and destruction. Humans perceive a problem, usually one caused by something they did, and in their attempts to correct that problem, yet another problem arises.
Macquarie Island in the South Pacific, European trading ships discovered the island in 1810. It was uninhabited except for a vast population of albatross and sea birds, as well as the breeding grounds for both seals and penguins. The English traders hunted the fur seals and the elephant seals almost to extinction, then they started in on the penguins for their oil.
Rats, of course, are ubiquitous to any ship set out to sea, and these Englishmen unwittingly introduced rats to the Macquarie ecosystem. Soon after, rats began to flourish on the island.
Of course, the sailors knew how to control rats. Cats were also often a part of the crew on most sailing vessels. They left a few of them on the island to deal with the rats, and before long, feral cats became a problem. They were the first land-based predator, and the birds, along with penguins, and, of course, the rats were their prey.
To distract the cats, William Elder of the Otago Whaling Company thought introducing rabbits to the island would be a good way to stop the cats from killing the penguins that were such a good source of profitable oil. But then, as rabbits, do, they bred…like rabbits, and the rabbit population soared. Rabbits ate the grass, which led to erosion of the soil, in turn, destroying the breeding grounds of the penguins.
So many rabbits led to an even further explosion of the cats, which, as food became scarce, turned to hunting the Macquarie parrots found in only one spot of the world. The last Macquarie parrot was sighted in 1891.
Macquarie Island is only one example. Cyril had seen this long ago. He’d gotten the confirmation he needed, the understanding that had been there all along but that so many had ignored. Humans, especially modern humanity, were the rats introduced into a well-balanced world. Humans, left to their own devices, were allowed to explode in population size. The earth is its own Macquarie Island. And now a culling was long overdue.
Magic had to be brought back into this world again. And with it, the Fae, the progenitors of magic.
He walked down the long, dark hallway of his office, the space punctuated by the glow of firelight in the rooms.
Cyril was a man who was confident of his place, his position on the food chain. In spite of all that he had, all his worldly possessions, he was a man willing to accept his place again. He worshipped at the altar of Thaddeus, and he would kiss the feet of his queen, Morgauna. Her voice would once again strike fear into the hearts of men who believed themselves too big to fail.
At the end of the hallway, he touched the palm of his hand to a place on the wall. The black marble shimmered and faded away to reveal a dark entryway. Beyond the blackness, a stone stairwell formed from nothing as the magic set up in this place asserted itself to a pre-programmed set of instructions. And, while the stairs still formed ahead of his footsteps, he climbed the stairs until they ended at another doorway that drifted into mist as he approached.
On the roof of the building that housed Tellus, Inc. and his Gaea Initiative, he stood at the entrance to another chamber, this one hallowed. Nearby, wind rustled through tall grass, a green roof gone wild. The sight of the structure before him was awe inspiring. It was visible to the naked eye, to anyone who stood atop the taller towers in the Loop downtown. But those viewing the top of the Tellus, Inc. building were unable to appreciate the majesty of the place, carefully constructed to exacting specifications. They were plans drawn up by Cyril himself.
It looked like a dome made of stone, like the architecture of old Europe infused into a modern structure of glass and steel. It echoed the dome on St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, a fitting nod to the sweeping changes that ushered in the world as it was today. Not a celebration, but a mockery. How fitting to bring about such a needed change to the world by calling attention to a symbol of that which only helped to spread its sickness.
On the outside, there were arched doors separated by granite stone columns. When the doors were thrown open, the interior of the space could look out in any direction. It was from this place that Cyril planned to see the changes unfold.
He went inside the structure through the brass doors stained green with age and exposure to the elements.
Inside, it was dark. With a wave of his hand, ten-thousand candles lit, all the way up the curve of the inner dome. The light cast down upon the circle in the center rivaled that of a stadium, of Soldier Field just visible between the other tall buildings in the city.
In the center of the circle, a great beast rose some twenty feet tall, a beast of black smoke with wings that stretched twice its height or more. Its eyes were dark holes that looked upon a realm blacker than any conceived of in any religious texts.
Cyril moved up to the edges of the circle. The beast snarled and whipped its black tail and flapped its wings until Cyril held up a hand. Then it settled and lowered its large head to sit eye level with Cyril.
He placed his hand upon the monster’s forehead and closed his eyes. They could no longer find the boy, but now they knew so much more than they did before. Since the identity of Liam was finally revealed, Cyril was able to gather enough information. Enough, he hoped, to draw the boy to him.
“Go,” Cyril said.
The beast reeled back to its full height again. It bounded toward one of the many great doors in the walls of the structure, and it threw them open. Then it took off into the sky once again.
Twenty-Three
Wilmette, IL
After hearing Liam screaming and Patrick running to find him, Patrick was glad when the others went on their way and left Liam and him
sitting alone in a breakfast nook off the kitchen. It wasn’t a formal dining area. This space was almost cozy, quaint, a table set back against a bank of windows that wrapped around it and provided a scenic overlook of Lake Michigan and the sunrise over the water.
Eoin told them they should get some rest, take one of the bedrooms upstairs and try to get some sleep. But Liam didn’t seem to take to that idea very well, and Patrick found himself in no mood to sleep either. The adrenaline was still flowing, even for him, to the point that it was a nearly constant rush. And it was going on nine in the morning. The sunlight served to zap any remaining inclination toward sleep. Instead, they sat at the table, Liam sipping a cup of coffee and Patrick watching him. He reached over and put a hand over Liam’s.
“You doing okay?” he asked. Patrick noticed it was the hand once marked with the tracker, the tracker he’d been responsible for attaching. Guilt was there, bubbling beneath the surface. None of this would have happened if he’d been more careful with his decisions.
Liam seemed to give it some thought for a moment. “I’m surprisingly good,” he said with a funny expression on his face. “Better now, at least. I think it might have something to do with this sudden enlightenment about the world and the fact that I’m not the craziest one in it anymore.” He had the stone on the table, at his elbow. Patrick saw that he kept a part of him in contact with it most of the time. An elbow, his forearm, and, when not holding his coffee cup, his hand curled around it.
“You never were the crazy one,” Patrick said.
Liam rolled his eyes. “Easy for you to say. I’ve had a whole life of crazy.” He turned toward the window, took a sip of his coffee. “At least now I know it’s not all my fault. You can’t really understand how much of a relief that is. A lot of shit makes more sense now than it did.”
“For you, maybe,” Patrick said. It wasn’t said with any malice or self-pity.
“Yeah,” Liam said with a smile. “It’s all relative, I guess.”
A moment of silence passed, the both of them staring out again over the lake and the skies reaching a pale gold and seagulls swooping round over the water. Then Patrick asked, “Do you believe in fate?”
“Weighty question there, Aristotle,” Liam said.
Patrick shrugged. “Just something I’m curious about.”
“Well, if everything Eoin told us last night is true, then I guess I have some pretty compelling evidence that fate has something to do with it.” Liam looked at him.
“So, you believe you’re descended from this Fionn mac Cumhaill?”
Liam had to think about that one too. “I’ve seen a lot of stuff tonight that makes me think there’s something else going on, something I can’t understand. Not yet. Honestly, being descended from an ancient king and that being the cause for everything is probably about the easiest answer I’ve gotten all night.”
“Have you ever heard of the name Sadhbh?”
A look of confusion crossed Liam’s face. “Who?”
“Just a name I heard.”
“From who?”
Patrick had to play this one through since he started the line of questioning. He hadn’t really figured out exactly what he was going to say if Liam started asking questions, so now he was going by ear. Patrick sure wasn’t about to tell Liam the truth about everything. His connection to Cyril couldn’t be known. “I overheard Eoin talking.”
“Well?” Liam gave an inquisitive smile. “What’d he say?”
Patrick took in a breath. “He said that I’m descended from someone named Sadhbh.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
Now Patrick met Liam’s gaze. “She was this Fionn mac Cumhaill’s true love.”
Liam started to laugh, but then it sunk in. “Wait, you think that’s why…?” Liam did a hand motion to refer to them both.
“Possibly,” Patrick said. “I mean, how else do you explain the connection we had from the beginning? Like you said, that’s probably the easiest answer for how we came together.”
“But that doesn’t really make sense,” Liam said. “I mean, what are the chances that two people descended from an ancient couple of kings and queens would suddenly find one another again?”
“Pretty astronomical,” Patrick said.
“That would be like…” Liam blew out a puff of air like he was trying to figure it out in his head. He glanced back with a confused slant to his mouth. “I mean, I’m really an English major, so that would be some pretty difficult math that’s way beyond my skill level of addition and subtraction. But yeah, astronomical is a good term.”
“Makes you think, doesn’t it,” Patrick said.
“Makes me think that there’s something else involved.”
“Like fate.”
Liam half smiled. “Yeah, like fate.” He leaned over and gave Patrick a kiss, and Patrick took it with a grin of his own. “Can’t say this is one twist of fate I’m complaining too much about.”
“Me either.”
It was a short kiss. Patrick would’ve gladly participated in more, but there were sounds coming from the direction of the living room. Or the dining room. The house was too large. It was hard to pinpoint the exact direction. They pulled apart, and Patrick took another sip of his coffee.
Patrick touched Liam’s wrists. The bracelets he wore covered them, but he’d seen them before, in the shower and in the bed. The scars. Patrick had his own scars, and the scars told a story. These on Liam’s wrist told a much different story.
Liam pulled his hand away.
“Don’t,” Patrick said, gently. He reached for Liam’s hand and took it again. “It’s okay.”
Liam’s glances were furtive. He turned and looked out the windows too. “That was a very dark time in my life,” Liam said.
Patrick ran his fingers along the mottled flesh on Liam’s wrist. “We all have our darkness,” Patrick said.
“Well, mine was watching my family killed.”
For a moment, Patrick paused. He took Liam’s hand, palm to his palm to let the energy flow, and he cupped his other hand over it. “I’m sorry you had to witness that,” he said.
With a shrug, Liam dismissed it. “Yeah, it’s in the past now.”
“Something like that, watching someone killed,” Patrick said. “That doesn’t ever leave you.”
“Have you…?”
Patrick met his gaze. “Yes,” he said. “I said before, I’ve seen a lot. I’ve witnessed a lot of death. Too much.”
“When you were in the military?”
He wasn’t sure how much of this he wanted to tell. There were certain precautions he was forced to take in his line of work, some of them regulatory, but most of them just good common sense. A common-sense rule that was pretty universal was to keep quiet about the job. There was no restriction on telling someone close, a friend or a family member, who he was employed by. The Central Intelligence Agency didn’t expressly forbid it, so long as operational details of service, especially those matters relating to national security, weren’t shared.
Until now, he’d never really had anybody outside his working life he wanted to tell. His parents knew, of course. They were told later, after Patrick’s graduation from high school. Before then, they were told, simply, that Patrick had a scholarship to a school for gifted children. One where most students graduated with jobs in the various intelligence agencies around the country. Most of his friendships were from that school or from college, and they all either already know or they weren’t in his life long enough or important enough for him to want to tell them.
Liam was different. He hadn’t been in Patrick’s life for long, but it was long enough. With a sigh, Patrick turned to Liam. “I want to tell you something. About my line of work,” he said.
Liam’s brow furrowed. “Okay.”
“I don’t just work for the military. I do work with the military, but I’m not an actual member of the military.”
“Okay,” Liam said again like he was unsure wh
ere this was going.
“Actually, I work for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
The expression on Liam’s face was one of surprise. “The Central Intelligence Agency,” Liam repeated. “The Central Intelligence Agency. US Government, spies, and shit.”
“And shit. Yes.”
Liam didn’t say anything for a long moment.
Patrick studied him. “I can’t tell you much more than that, but yeah, I thought you should know.”
“Wow,” Liam said. Then a grin spread on his face. “I hooked up with a spy.”
Patrick couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, if that’s how you want to see it.”
“That’s pretty bad ass, I must say.”
The grin was infectious. “This is going a little differently than I imagined it would with you. No questions? No doubts?” He’d heard stories of some friends and family thinking at first their loved ones were on a psychotic break with delusions of grandeur. To some, telling loved ones they’re a spy ranks up there with people saying they’re Napoleon or Jesus. It’s not every day somebody they care about proclaims they’re secret agents in a government intelligence agency.
Liam shook his head. “Being told you’re a spy is pretty much the most mundane thing I’ve heard since yesterday, so yeah, no. No questions at this point.”
“Okay, then.” Patrick grinned.
“And hey, it’s not every day you get to tell people you went to bed with a spy.”
“Well, I mean, you probably shouldn’t tell others. It’s not something I like to share freely. I don’t have business cards with my name and government spy written on them.”
“Of course,” Liam said. “And yeah, don’t worry. I’m not going to tell anybody anything.” He considered it a moment more. “I’m definitely going to say it in my head, though, a few times: ‘My boyfriend’s a spy.’”
Patrick quirked a brow. “Is that what we are?”
It hit Liam then what he’d said. “Oh God. I did just say that, didn’t I? Geez, I’m like a lesbian with a U-Haul on the second date.”
The Stone (Lockstone Book 1) Page 28
