Jamie scratched the back of his neck and shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “I don’t think he would have sent us that message if he didn’t have something on his mind. At least we have good news for him.”
“Good news and bad.”
“What’s the bad news?”
I knocked once on the door to Charles’ office and let myself in since he was expecting us. Charles perked up from his desk and gestured for us both to enter the room. He looked tired, like he hadn’t slept in days, but that didn’t take away from the inner light he seemed to possess. His stubble had grown to the point where it darkened his face, but he kept his sandy brown hair, which was graying at the sides, neatly combed. Elegant.
Jamie was every bit as handsome as his father. They had the same color hair, the same green eyes, but there was something about Jamie that his father didn’t have; something that spoke of a biological trait passed down by a mother with potentially exotic roots. A mother I hadn’t heard a single word about in the three weeks since I had met both men.
“You wanted to see us?” I asked as I came in.
“Yes, please,” Charles said, standing to greet us. “Sit down.”
I took my place at one of the chairs in the room. Jamie sat down on the one beside me. “Is everything alright?” Jamie asked. “Your message sounded urgent.”
“You first,” Charles said, sitting back down. “I know you safely brought our defectors back to HQ, but how did everything go?”
“I think it went well,” I said. “Aside from the stupid disguises we had to wear. I swear, I’m never doing that again.”
“I know exactly what you mean, but unless you want to be recognized the moment you step into public, a disguise is needed. I’m glad, at least, that the mission went smoothly.”
“It didn’t go entirely smoothly,” Jamie said. “The Faction was following our targets. They knew something was going to go down today.”
“Luckily, they didn’t know I would be involved,” I said. “Otherwise we may not have made it out at all.”
“Do you think we have a leak?” Charles asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I think it points more to suspicion on their side than a leak from ours.”
“Agreed,” Charles said. He sighed deeply, then pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, wincing as if something had caused him pain, or maybe just from tiredness.
“What’s the bad news?”
“Bad news?”
“Outside, you said you had bad news.”
“Heard that, huh?”
He looked up, smiling weakly. “I hear everything that happens within these halls.”
I looked over at Jamie, then back at Charles. “Alright,” I said. “I’m just going to say it. I don’t think we’re safe here anymore.”
“Safe?” Jamie asked.
“The Order has a lot more heat on it now than it’s ever had, thanks to me. Yeah, the Faction is low on resources, but they’re still hunting us down, and every time we go out on a mission they get a little closer to catching us. How long before they find this place?”
“But we’re protected here with magic and technology.”
“That’s true,” Charles put in, “Nevertheless, I fear she’s right. We have always been at war with the Faction, they have always hunted us, but I also feel this in my gut. Is that what you feel also?”
I nodded. “The Faction knows it’s outclassed right now, and they’re scrambling with what resources they have to find us, to set traps. But I know them well. They’ll pick themselves back up, they’ll rally, and when they do, they’ll find us. We’re sitting ducks as long as we’re still here.”
“Where do you suggest we go?” Jamie asked.
I almost didn’t want to say how I felt or what I was thinking. I had to look over at Charles and watch him nod in order to have the courage to speak. Charles wasn’t reading my thoughts, and yet he still knew what I was about to say. Judging by the look in his eyes, I felt like maybe he had been up late thinking about the very same thing.
“If we want to be safe from the Faction,” I said, “we need to leave New Seattle.”
“Wait a second…” Jamie said, putting a hand up. “Leave? And go where?”
“I don’t know, but we need to find a safe place and set up a base of operations outside of the city—outside of the barrier.”
The barrier was what we called the huge, domed, magic shield surrounding New Seattle. Erected more than two hundred years ago, and with a diameter of almost a hundred miles, the bubble was the only thing keeping New Seattle and its inhabitants safe from whatever existed outside of it. Way back when, the bubble had been necessary to protect those mages and their human charges from the devastating storms that wracked the planet—storms powerful enough to topple skyscrapers and lay ruin to entire cities. According to what few history books anyone was allowed to read, the storms had been the first thing to hit civilization; the first wave in an attack with the sole purpose of wiping out humanity itself.
Staring through the bubble, all anyone would have seen were lashing whips of lightning, roaring clouds, and entire clusters of twisters as big as small villages. When the first super volcano erupted, turning the sky red, and then black, the mages who had erected the shield decided humans should never have to see what the planet was doing to itself. So, they created the illusion of a perfectly normal country landscape stretching out of the city to its farthest reaches.
No one really knew what the world looked like outside except the people sitting at the very top of the Faction, and the traders who travel in between cities so no one is left without. Traders were anonymous, and they were specially trained to deal with any threat they might face outside. No one knew how they were picked, and no one had ever questioned it.
A long silence filled the room, and then Charles spoke. “I disagree,” he said. “I think we need to find a safer place for our base of operations, but not even I have the capacity to see beyond the shield. I have no idea what’s on the other side, and unknown variables make me nervous. This could be a huge risk, and it isn’t one I’m willing to take.”
“I get that, but if we get out of New Seattle and set ourselves up somewhere the Faction can’t easily get to us, then we can build up our resources and really bring the fight to them when we’re ready. On our terms, not theirs.”
“This is crazy,” Jamie said. “You can’t seriously be asking us to leave the city, right? We don’t know what’s out there. For all we know, we can’t even breathe the air.”
He had caught me there. For all my convictions about how leaving New Seattle was the best option, the truth was we really didn’t have any idea what to expect. When mages built this city, they did so after a series of Earth-shattering natural disasters, which rendered the planet practically inhospitable to human life. I had grown up on this belief, and it wasn’t an easy one to shake.
Jamie quietened, and a knock on the door filled the silence that followed. “Come in,” Charles said, and Abel Rios walked into the room.
There was something about that man’s presence that stole the attention of everyone within his immediate vicinity, like a black hole. Where Jamie and his father seemed to radiate light, Abel seemed to carry with him a kind of darkness that always made his face look more serious than it ought to, though with Abel it was hard to tell; he was all business, all the time. Right now, even knowing that Abel had crossed to our side of the battle lines and joined the Order, that tightening of my chest remained.
“You wanted to see me?” Abel asked once inside.
“Yes, I did,” Charles said. He tapped on the touchscreen display in front of him and turned the screen around so we could see it. On it was a fuzzy picture of a man, likely taken by a network camera downtown. Though the image was blurry, recognition of the man on the screen came immediately, and it brought an even further tightening of my chest. This wasn’t like seeing a ghost; it was like seeing several hundred ghosts calling m
y name, their voices pitched high into blood-curdling screams.
“Holy fucking shit,” I said.
“You recognize him?” Charles asked.
I looked up at Abel, who also nodded. “We do,” Abel said.
“What do you know about him?”
Abel drew in a deep breath and pressed his lips into a hard line. “His name is Roman Tanner, hunter division. I worked with him for a number of years enforcing the Faction’s deportation laws.”
“Or in other words,” I said, “kicking innocent Fae out of our world and back into the hell that was theirs.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“Yes, you did. I did too, and I made it. I told the Faction where to stick their extradition orders.”
“I’m not going to apologize to you for what I did while I was on the Faction’s payroll any more than I expect you to apologize to them.”
The room fell silent again just as that cold thing happened to my stomach. My eyes turned to Jamie, who was looking at his feet, and Charles, who was looking right at me. “I don’t want anyone to apologize for anything,” Charles said. “All I want is as much information on this man as you can give me.”
Abel nodded. “Roman was the Faction’s best Fae hunter, even if his code of ethics was in the toilet. That’s probably what made him good at finding them and sending them back to their homeland.”
“He was a fucking monster,” I said, “Don’t sugarcoat things.”
“Yes,” Abel said, “He was a monster. Roman would usually find not only the Fae he had been tasked to find, but also others associated with the mark. At first no one knew how he did it, but then we found out.”
“He was torturing them,” I said. “Sometimes he just killed them. It was all the same to the Faction.”
“How do you know this?” Charles asked.
“Because my best friend is one of the Fae, and because the Faction never tried to hide their disdain for the Seelie Fae, even though they allow the Unseelie to operate out of Oldtown. But the Seelie aren’t criminals like the Unseelie; they’re people fleeing from a world that had become inhospitable to them. They only wanted to have a better life on our side of the veil.”
Talking about him made my blood boil and my heart sink all at once. I had never worked with him, thankfully, but the idea that the Faction not only had him on their payroll, but refused to remove him from his position after they found out he was torturing Fae… I should have known then there was something rotten going on, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt because while I didn’t believe in their policy of throwing the Fae out of our world, I still believed the Faction was a good thing.
“He disappeared almost two years ago,” Abel said, “after it was discovered he was torturing civilians who were harboring the Fae. There was no trial; he was simply there one day, before the news broke, and gone the next. Most thought he had been sent to a cell somewhere and locked away, others thought he had simply been executed, and they were glad for it. Nobody liked him. Including me.” Abel approached the monitor and stared at the picture. “Where did you get this?” he asked. “When was this taken?”
Charles pointed at the timestamp on the picture. “Today,” he said. “About a block away from the scene of a murder.”
“Murder?” Jamie asked. “What murder?”
“He killed one of my men,” Charles said. “One of the men running interference for your mission.”
Jamie ran his hands through his sandy hair. “Oh shit… who?”
“Jacobs was killed. His partner, Helena, only escaped with her life because Roman was too busy killing Jacobs. If she had let the shock hit her, she wouldn’t have made it back to HQ, and we wouldn’t know that this ghost has come back from the dead.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I didn’t know someone had been killed.”
“No one does. Not yet. I’ll tell them when the time is right. First, I wanted to find out as much as I could about the murderer because, from what Helena tells me, there’s something about him I don’t want the rest of the Order to know.”
My stomach went cold, and my hands locked up into fists. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Roman’s magic was too strong for that of a regular Faction hunter, even for one of renown.”
“What are you saying?”
“What I’m saying is, I believe Roman Tanner is unchipped.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Bittersweet. That was the only word to describe the way today had gone.
We had successfully rescued Kim and Daliah from the Faction, and they were now resting after their chip removals. Great. Good job. But one of our number had died in order for us to achieve that small victory, and to make things worse, Roman fucking Tanner was somehow back in play. His was a name I never thought I would have to hear again, not after what he did—what we had caught him doing.
Where had they put him? What had he been doing for the past two years? He couldn’t have been kept in New Seattle, and he couldn’t have been acting on behalf of the Faction—he would have been spotted. Someone would have found out. So where had he been? What had he been doing?
These thoughts all plagued the shower I was trying to enjoy, questions battering at the edges of my mind like those fabled planet-wide storms that once wracked our delicate blue marble, tearing everything our species had ever built to the ground. I couldn’t find respite from them, there wasn’t a shield powerful enough to throw up and allow me to enjoy the good we had done today. Because we had done some good, hadn’t we? We had rescued some people, had learned a bunch of stuff, but the cost was too high. One life was too much to pay for what we had achieved, and that was something I couldn’t allow to continue indefinitely.
More than ever, I knew we had to leave New Seattle.
I put on a pair of black leggings and a matching sports bra in preparation for a gym session I knew I was never gonna go to, not after today’s unplanned workout. Just as I was towel drying my hair, there was a knock on my bedroom door. Looking at the monitor, I saw it was Jamie, and since Aisha wasn’t around—neither was her snake, so she was probably taking it for a walk—I opened it.
“Hey,” I said, tossing the towel on the bed. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much,” he said. He looked, and smelled, like he’d just come out of the shower too. He presented a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. “Just thought we could celebrate having pulled today off.”
“Celebrate?” I asked, a smile brightening my face. “I’m not about to say no to that.”
Stepping aside, Jamie walked into the room, then set the bottle and glasses down on a desk by the wall.
Quiet excitement began to bubble in the pit of my stomach, filling me with something like anticipation, or giddiness—I wasn’t sure which. When my glass had a couple of fingers of whiskey in it, he handed it over, and I took it. He poured a similar amount into his, then he set the bottle down, closed it, and turned to look at me.
“To our win,” he said, raising his glass.
“And to two less mages under the Faction’s control,” I said.
We clinked, then sipped. The whiskey was warm and smooth as it travelled down my throat. That same feeling then radiated into my chest and stomach as the seconds passed. I looked toward him as I took another sip, and tried to figure out when was the last time Jamie and I had been alone like this. Though we had only known each other a short time, I almost couldn’t remember a time in my life when I went a day without seeing him, or talking to him, but being that we were at war, our meetings were never private, or even comfortable, let alone… intimate, as this was.
“So, do we have any idea what we’re going to do next?” I asked.
Jamie shook his head. “Difficult to tell. My dad doesn’t talk to me about his plans much anymore.”
“Really? Is something up?”
“I don’t know. I think he’s just stressed out by this whole thing.”
I took another sip of my whiske
y. “I can imagine. This isn’t the kind of situation anyone wants to be in. First defectors, then Roman, then I plant the shield thing on his lap.”
“It isn’t your fault, so don’t blame yourself.”
“I won’t, I won’t.” I took another sip, then set my glass down on the table. “You know, I was kidding when I said your sweater looked ugly.”
“Were you?” he asked, smiling from behind the rim of his glass. “Because you seemed pretty serious.”
“Oh, no, I was serious back then—your disguise was ridiculous. But that sweater would have looked adorable on you.”
“Adorable,” he said, drawing the word out like he couldn’t believe I had just used it.
“Yes… what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing I’ve just… never been called that before.”
“First time for everything, right?”
He smiled, but I could tell his eyes were troubled. For one, he’d almost finished his drink faster than I had, and considering we’d started at the same time, it left me wondering if he’d been needing to take the edge off. But, off of what? Maybe that thing with his dad excluding him from his plans, or maybe he was just nervous about this whole situation. Leaving New Seattle was a big deal. It just wasn’t something any of us, not even Order mages, had been raised on.
Nobody left the city.
Jamie took a long breath, and the way he looked at me then caused my heart to flutter, but my heart didn’t keep its rapid pace; normal heartbeats resumed after that initial lurch, that odd rush. It was as if his stare had supercharged the particles between us and suddenly hit me with a burst of… something. And then it was gone, gone as soon as he had looked away.
“Do you think there’s really a way out of the city?” he finally asked, almost out of the blue.
I frowned and exhaled deeply before replying, “Yes. I think there is.”
Jamie paused again.
“Jamie?” I asked, not sure why he hadn’t said anything.
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