by DAVID B. COE
“No. As I told you at the time, Etienne de Cahors was a runemyste, but he chafed at the limitations placed on my kind by the Runeclave.” Namid paused, appearing uncomfortable. “What I did not tell you then is that he was lured into disgrace by the necromancers. He was to be their prize. He could have told them much about our craftings and how they might be overcome.
“They gave him aid at the beginning, instructing him in the uses of blood magic. But he soon tired of their control. He wished to be beholden to none, to be free of the Runeclave and also of the dark ones. But he was important for other reasons.”
Something in the way Namid said this caught my ear. “What reasons?”
“They invested much in him: decades of wheedling, secrets of their evil magicking, their darkest aspirations. When he abandoned them, they were enraged. Their one consolation was that my kind were even more enraged. Their loss was great; ours was greater. We were thirty-nine. When we lost him we were thirty-eight. This pleased them, and more, it gave them a glimpse of a possible path forward from their failure. Equally important, they took note of how he died. And at whose hand.”
“Mine,” I said.
“Just so.”
“This is why they’re so interested in me. Because I killed Cahors.”
“Because you are a weremyste who killed Cahors. The necromancers long were contemptuous of weremyste power. They have subordinates of your kind—weremancers, we call them. But they have never considered them more than servants to their cause. Your victory over Cahors has forced them to consider the weremancers anew, to imagine a new role for them in this war.”
“And what role is that?”
The myste shook his head. “This I do not know.”
I wanted to believe him, but I wasn’t sure that I did. He’d kept too much from me over the years.
“Do you know who was in the car that came after me right before you showed up?”
“I know it was a weremancer, but that is all.”
“So a weremyste was able to attack my heart that way?”
He shook his head. “No. I felt a second presence as well: a necromancer. It was she who attacked you. I believe the weremancer was here to . . . to finish you, as you would put it.”
I found this comforting in a strange way. I couldn’t have seized another person’s heart with magic the way the necromancer seized mine. I didn’t want to think there were other runecrafters like me out there who could. “I warded my heart from her attack. If her magic is comparable to yours, I shouldn’t have been able to do that.”
“You may have surprised her with your warding. Or she may still be familiarizing herself with your craft. Do not count on such spells working a second time.”
I nodded at that, my mind already turning in a new direction. “It’s necromancers who are hurting my father, right?”
“I do not know, Ohanko. I believe it is possible, assuming that Leander Fearsson’s suffering is not—forgive me—the product of delusion.”
“It’s not.”
“You know this?”
“I feel it,” I said. “I’m going to see him now. You’re welcome to stay with me and see him for yourself.”
“Thank you. Perhaps I will.”
We drove in silence for a minute or two. I had more questions for the myste, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to ask them, not because I thought he would refuse to respond, but because I didn’t think I’d like his answers. It didn’t take long for the cop in me to decide this was a piss-poor reason not to ask.
“Since the day I met you, you’ve been telling me that you and your fellow mystes are forbidden from interfering in our world.”
“And we still are.”
“Even now?”
“Our laws have not changed.”
“But circumstances have. You can’t expect weremystes to fight off these necromancers without help.”
“Our expectations are irrelevant.” I started to argue, but he held up a translucent hand, stopping me. “We are what we are. Our laws help to define us. To ignore them out of expedience diminishes us, makes us little better than those you would have us fight on your behalf. We can help you, prepare you, guide you. But we cannot intervene. To do so would compromise too much.”
“You intervened with Cahors,” I said, knowing what he would say.
“This I have explained to you as well. Cahors was an anomaly, one of our own who escaped our notice. He acted on your world in large part because our vigilance slackened. We did what was necessary to undo some of the damage he wrought. This is different.”
Not the answer I had been hoping for, but I had to admit that there was a certain logic to what he said. That logic was likely to get me killed, but, hey, at least the runemystes were sticking to their principles.
“You’re putting a lot at risk,” I said. “They may be your laws, but it’s our lives you’re wagering.”
“Not yours alone.”
I frowned, looked over at him. “What do you mean?”
“Think, Ohanko. What is it the necromancers want?”
I shrugged. “Power?”
“Yes, of course. But what lies in their path to power?”
I thought about it for all of three seconds before the answer became obvious. The runemystes wouldn’t intervene directly, but what other beings would the necromancers fear? Weremystes could fight them; many of us would. We didn’t stand a chance, though, without the runemystes doing all that Namid had said they would: training us, preparing us, guiding us.
What did they want? They wanted to destroy Namid and his brethren.
“It’s you who are at risk,” I said. “I’m sorry. I should have understood. The necromancers see the thirty-eight of you as the only obstacles they have to overcome.”
He nodded, solemn and slow. “That is our belief as well. You should know, however, that there are now but thirty-seven of us left.”
CHAPTER 15
I gaped at him. Cahors’s betrayal was one thing, but to lose another runemyste . . . I didn’t know how that was possible.
“What happened? Did another of your kind . . . go over to the dark side?”
I regretted the wording as soon as I said it. Fortunately Namid rarely caught my pop culture references.
“No,” he said. “As far as I know, there was no betrayal. At least not as you mean it. A runemyste was murdered.”
Which was far, far worse.
“Do you know who did it? Or how?”
“We do not know. We know only that one of her weremystes was killed as well. They died together, perhaps battling a necromancer and his or her servants.”
“How does one even kill a runemyste?” I asked.
Namid turned my way, his expression unreadable. “None but another runemyste can do it, and even that would be no small feat. I might slay one of my brethren, but I would have to vanquish him in what would be a great and terrible battle.”
“But a necromancer has as much power as you do, right?”
“A necromancer has power to harm your world and to craft spells that would seem as powerful as mine. But the Runeclave made my kind centuries ago. We are creatures of magic, elemental. We cannot be destroyed so easily.”
“And yet, one of you was.”
“Yes,” he said, the word coming out as flat and hard as a river stone.
By now we had reached the Phoenix-Wickenburg Highway. I hadn’t seen another silver sedan or sensed the presence of the necromancer since Namid appeared in my car. He might not have been willing to act on the human world, but merely by staying with me, he was keeping me safe. I almost said something to this effect, but I didn’t want him leaving, so I kept my mouth shut.
I followed the highway to Wofford and soon reached the rutted road leading into my father’s place. Namid remained beside me in the passenger seat, his watery face impassive, his hands resting on his thighs.
I stopped near the trailer and switched off the engine, but I didn’t open the door right away.
“It has been many years.”
“So this might not go so well.”
“I have always been fond of Leander Fearsson, and I believe he was fond of me. Even with the moon sickness, I do not believe he will be displeased to see me.”
I didn’t feel that I could argue the point without being rude, and I really did want Namid to see firsthand what my Dad was going through. But I was less convinced than the myste that this would prove to be a great idea.
I climbed out of the car and closed the door, expecting Namid to do the same. But when I turned, he was already standing beside me. I jumped, hissing a curse. The passenger door had never opened.
My father sat in his chair, staring across the desert, flinching every few seconds. I could see that he was muttering to himself. He seemed to have on clean clothes, but he wasn’t wearing socks. Mixed signals.
“Try not to startle him,” I said, my heart still hammering as I began walking toward my dad. Namid followed.
At first my father took no notice of us. And why should he? Each time I’d come to see him, he’d been in a similar state and had largely ignored me until I spoke to him or checked his forehead for fever. But Namid and I hadn’t been there for more than a minute—I’d barely had time to pull out a second lawn chair—when my dad’s flinching ceased and he looked up, first at me and then at the runemyste.
“They left,” he said, his gaze lingering on Namid, his voice rough with disuse. “They sensed you, and they left.”
Namid frowned. “I had hoped to observe you under their influence, perhaps to learn something of their nature.”
“Their nature is they’re afraid of runemystes.”
“How are you feeling?” I asked him, stooping to kiss his brow.
“Hungry.”
“You’re always hungry when I get here.”
My dad grinned. “You always feed me.” He canted his head in Namid’s direction. “What made you bring the ghost?”
“I am not a ghost!” Namid said, in a voice like pounding surf.
I laughed.
“You Fearsson men share a most peculiar sense of humor.”
“I guess that still gets him riled, doesn’t it?”
“Did I learn it from you?” I asked. I was still smiling; no one enjoyed humor at the runemyste’s expense more than I did. But there was something a little weird about it, too. It was like finding out that my Dad and I once had the same teacher in high school, or the same girlfriend, but without the “ick” factor. Ridiculous as I knew it would seem to the runemyste, I had long considered Namid my mentor—mine, and no one else’s. I found it hard to imagine him training another weremyste, especially a younger version of my father.
“Seriously, Justis. Why’d you bring him here? Did you know it would make them leave me alone?”
I shook my head. “I’d love to tell you I’m that clever, but I’m not. He asked about you, and I told him I was on my way here. He came along.”
My dad shifted his gaze to Namid. “You must have known what would happen when you showed up.”
“I did not. I was not entirely certain that your suffering was anything more than delusion.”
“Thanks a lot,” Dad said, his tone as dry as a Sonoran wind.
“You should know that Ohanko insisted that it was real.”
“Ohanko?”
“That’s what he calls me,” I said. “It means ‘reckless one.’”
Dad narrowed his eyes. “What was it you used to call me? Lokni, right?”
The myste’s waters rippled gently. “Yes. It was also a name born of frustration. You were as stubborn as your son, and even more likely to chance upon danger.”
“You were also a better runecrafter,” I said. I waved a hand at Namid. “He’s told me so several times.”
Dad looked away, following the flight of a red-tailed hawk with his eyes. “That’s okay. You’re stronger than I ever was. You got that from your mother.”
I shared a quick glance with the myste.
“Tell me what has been done to you, Leander Fearsson.”
Dad’s mouth twisted sourly. “You want me to waste your time with delusions?”
“I no longer believe them to be delusions. Delusions do not flee at the arrival of a runemyste.”
My father’s gaze found me. After a moment he nodded and launched into a description of the psychic and physical torture to which he’d been subjected over the past couple of weeks. I had pieced together most of it from his ramblings and the few coherent minutes we’d shared during my previous visits. But hearing as a single narrative all that he had endured—the pain inflicted on his body, sometimes for days uninterrupted, and the images from his past forced into his mind—made my hands shake with rage. I wanted to turn my magic on whoever had done all of this to him.
He repeated himself some—he was relatively lucid, particularly when compared to what I’d seen recently, but he was still a burned out old weremyste. After a while I went inside the trailer to make him a sandwich. When I came back out again and handed him the plate, he was still rambling.
“There was nothing random about it,” he said, as he had several minutes before. He took a bite of his sandwich and added for my benefit, “It probably seemed pretty random from the outside. They were testing me, almost like they wanted to see what hurt the most.”
“You talked about the burning a lot. Was that the worst?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging and talking around a mouthful of food. “It all hurt. The burns, knife points, bludgeoning. And then there was the emotional stuff.” He faced me again. “They dredged up memories of your mother, threatened to hurt you, took me back to my worst memories of when I was on the job.”
“To what end?” Namid asked. As far as I knew, it was the first thing the myste had said since my father began his story.
“I don’t know.”
“They threatened Ohanko. Did they say more about him?”
Dad raked fingers through his white hair, so that it stood on end. “Like I said, they talked about hurting him, because they knew that would hurt me. But the rest . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t remember.”
“You heard voices,” I said, remembering the message I’d gotten at Solana’s just as the restaurant blew up. “Male or female?”
“Both. Female mostly. One in particular. But others, too.” He attempted a smile but managed only a grimace. “There have been a lot of people in my head.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that last, so I focused on the first thing he’d said. “The woman’s voice: low, gravelly, kind of sexy even?”
“You’ve heard her, too?”
“I think she blew up that restaurant I was in with Billie.”
His eyes widened, and I had the sense that he didn’t remember me mentioning this before. “She’s all right? Billie, I mean?”
“She’s getting better. I’ll let her know that you asked.”
Dad nodded. I could tell he was overwhelmed by all of this: Namid’s appearance, the news about Billie, all he had been through with the dark mystes. Maybe it had been a mistake to let him see the runemyste.
“Very well, Leander Fearsson.” The myste paused, pain lurking in his glowing eyes. “I must leave you. And I fear that when I do, those who have done this to you will return.”
“I’ll stay with him.”
“No, you won’t,” my dad said, growling the words. “You have work to do, don’t you?”
I hesitated.
“Yeah, I thought so. And you, ghost, you have stuff to do, too. Important stuff.”
“Dad—”
“Justis, you can’t babysit me!” He huffed a breath and tried with little success to smooth his hair. “You can’t stay here forever,” he went on after a few moments, his tone less strident. “And you’ve already made things better.”
“But for how long?”
“For all of it,” h
e said. “I mean that. Even when they’re doing their worst, I still have a shred of myself to hold on to. And knowing that you believe me, that both of you do . . . That’s worth something.”
I could do more good back in the city, following up on the few leads I had. I knew this. But the thought of leaving him to these bastards was more than I could handle.
He saw me struggling and managed a smile that broke my heart. “Go. I’ll be all right.”
“I’ll be back. I’ll try to come tonight; tomorrow at the latest.”
“Good. Bring more ice cream.”
I stood, hugged him, and put my chair back.
“Farewell, Lokni. Be well.”
“Take care of him, Namid,” Dad said.
“I will do what I can.”
Before the myste could leave, I said, “Ride with me back to the city. I have a few more questions for you.” At Namid’s frown, I added, “Please.”
“For a short while.”
I climbed back into the Z-ster. When I glanced toward the passenger seat, the myste was already there, his waters still and clear.
I held my tongue until we were away from the trailer and back on the main road through Wofford.
“So?” I asked.
Sometimes Namid could be pretty dense, and I half expected him to act like he didn’t know what I was asking. But this time at least, he answered the question.
“I believe that he has been under siege from necromancers,” he said. “That is the lone explanation for what I saw and what he told us. But I do not know what they hope to gain by causing him pain. Forgive me, but he is an old man and represents neither a threat to them nor a prize to be won. You, on the other hand, are a formidable enemy and, potentially, a valuable ally.”
“I’d never ally myself with necromancers.”
“You and I know this to be true; they do not. And they may believe that by using your father in this way, they can manipulate you.”
As much as I hated to admit it, that made a good deal of sense.
“Is there more you wish to ask me?”
