by Gwynn White
And it was just all too close for comfort. Centuries ago, demons had done the same things to us. They’d experimented on mages with drugs and machines, magic and technology. They might have been gone now, but their abominable work lived again in Vib.
I could see Jason assessing the scene, the threats. He was calculating how the hell we were going to capture Vib when he was surrounded by so many bodyguards. Jason was a superb fighter, but we were severely outnumbered. Fierce loyalty shone in the eyes of Vib’s children. I didn’t doubt that each and every one of them would lay down their life for Vib. And that was what made them truly dangerous.
Vib took the puffiest seat in the room, a lime green armchair. It clashed horribly with his deep purple overcoat. “Sit,” he growled, wiping the sweat from his perfectly-hairless head. Filtered sunshine danced and sparkled against his bald scalp.
Jason and I squeezed onto a narrow, lilac-colored sofa opposite him.
“Marvelous,” Vib said, beaming once again. “Now, where were we? Ah, of course. Refreshments. Opal! Pearl! Come here, dears.”
Two female mages entered the room. They approached us, each carrying a serving tray. They were like two opposites of the same person. One had sparkling violet eyes and deep ebony skin. Her straight, white hair fell to her hips like silk. The second mage was the opposite: ivory skin with jet-black hair—also straight and hip-length—and vivid emerald-green eyes.
Even their clothes were the reverse of each other. The violet-eyed mage wore a form-fitting, mesh-thin, halter-top dress of pale purple, studded with thousands of tiny amethyst rhinestones that made her sparkle in the sunlight. The dress extended only halfway down her thighs, and she wore matching knee-high boots, also completely covered in rhinestones. The emerald-eyed mage’s dress and boots were identical, but the material was dark green and the rhinestones pale lime.
“This is Opal.” Vib gestured his left hand toward the emerald-eyed woman, who wore a necklace of alternating black and white opals. “And Pearl.” His right hand indicated the violet-eyed woman. She, too, wore a necklace, but one made of black and white pearls.
“What is this?” I gasped in shock.
“Opal and Pearl are my favorites,” Vib declared. His body was perched forward toward me and Jason, eyeing us with greedy fervor. “Though, you two…” He whistled, long and low. “I could do wonders with you. Such perfection.” He reached his hand toward me.
Jason moved to block me from him. “You stay away from her.”
Vib relaxed and fell back into his seat. “No need to get snappy, boy.” He gave Jason a long, thorough once-over. “You’re different when you’re with her. Your auras glow together. Like your magic wants to be one.”
Yes, look at all the pretty lights. The musings of a madman.
“Tell me about your powers,” Vib said to me. “Is it true you have foresights even without your accessories? That’s remarkable!” he exclaimed without waiting for me to answer. “What I wouldn’t give to see inside your head.”
A whistle and a thump sounded in my ears. I hadn't even blinked, and Jason was suddenly standing behind Vib’s seat, pressing a knife to the scientist’s throat.
The rainbow mages were on their feet, moving toward us. Vib lifted a hand to stop them.
Then Vib looked at Jason. “You didn’t come here to kill me, Jason Chanz. So let’s dispense with the pretenses and put that knife away.”
But Jason wasn’t folding, and he wasn’t bluffing. “No, I didn’t come here to kill you, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. How this ends depends entirely on you. It is your actions that determine whether you return to Pegasus breathing. Or in a bodybag.”
Jason really did have a flair for the dramatic. His face was blank, cold. But his eyes burned. Could he actually be excited about killing Vib? That was Phantoms in a nutshell: bloodbaths and stony glares. Maybe instead of working as his father’s enforcer, the life of an assassin would have suited him better.
Vib sighed. “What a shame. I was hoping we could all be friends.”
Then, suddenly, he was standing on the other side of the room. The mage at the wrong end of Jason’s knife was Ruby.
“She’s a Chameleon,” I said.
A Chameleon was another mage specialty, someone who could change their appearance. Ruby had made herself look like Vib—and Vib look like her. She’d done a stellar job of it too because Jason actually looked surprised. He could usually see right through any magic.
The mages surrounded me and Jason, moving as one—one body, one magic. I’d never seen anything like it. As they closed in, Vib escaped the building with Pearl and Opal.
“I will handle these six,” Jason said. “You go after Vib.”
“One against six? You’re good, Jason, but you aren’t a god.”
And these mages were too powerful. I could feel it. Jason couldn’t take on so many at once.
“I’ll manage. Go! Before he gets away.”
A blast of Phantom magic shot out of him, knocking a hole in the mages’ line. I jumped over them and ran for the door, following Vib’s escape path. As I burst out of the building, I saw him and his twin bodyguards run off the road into the woods that bordered the east side of town. There were several interworld portals hidden in the woods. I had to catch up to them before they escaped through one of them.
I broke into an all-out sprint, tearing through the woods. I was gaining on them. My daily runs with Jason were finally paying off; there was nothing like running with a Phantom to kick your butt into gear.
I heard the familiar tap of Jason’s feet. He was in the woods—and running fast. He’d gotten out of the building too. Unfortunately, so had the rainbow mages.
Magic rippled through the air like a sonic explosion. A silvery glow formed in front of Vib. The portal! I dashed forward, trying to grab him, but something slammed into me, throwing me to the ground. I looked up into Ruby’s eerie eyes.
“See you around,” Vib called out, then he jumped through the portal, hand-in-hand with Opal and Pearl.
Topaz, Citrine, Emerald, Sapphire, and Amethyst followed. The portal slid shut behind them.
Jason’s fist hit the side of Ruby’s head, and she collapsed. I pushed her off of me, standing.
Jason glanced from the sleeping mage at his feet, to where Vib and his twin bodyguards had disappeared. He looked like he was ready to jump through the portal after them.
I caught his arm, stopping him. “No, Jason. You can’t. That portal leads to Temporia. We can’t go there.”
Temporia was a world in the witches’ territory, the Avan Empire. We didn’t have clearance to travel to their worlds, and to be honest, I didn’t want to go there anyway. The witches were powerful, vicious, and the hellhounds that guarded their lands were the stuff of nightmares.
“Vib is either desperate, overconfident in his bodyguards, or working with the witches,” I commented.
“All three. His children are abominations.”
“What happened?”
“They were fighting without accessories.”
“How is that possible?” I asked. Without accessories, a weak mage could not use any magic—and a powerful mage could not control it.
“I don’t know. But they weren’t using any, and each one of them was as powerful as I am.”
“They all seemed linked, like they were fighting as one,” I said.
“Yes, I noticed that as well. It seems Vib has learned to link mages.”
“But to what end?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. But whatever he’s planning, it can’t be good.” Jason draped Ruby over his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s see if we can get her to tell us what she knows.”
3
The Veil of Secrecy
Well, let’s was more of an expression than an invitation. Jason brought Ruby back to Pegasus, where he would interrogate her alone. I could only imagine what those interrogations involved. He didn’t think I had the stomach for this sort of thing, and he
was probably right.
I had to get home anyway, so I took the portal loop back to my world. Laelia sat at the edge of the Wilderness, the home of mages. It was the part of the galaxy where magic reigned and technology died. Electricity didn’t work on planets in the Wilderness. That meant no computers, no cars, and no spaceships. The portal keys, devices that allowed us to travel instantly between worlds, worked because they were powered by magic.
As soon as I stepped through the portal, the sweet aroma of Laelia embraced my senses, welcoming me home.
Overhead, the midday sun punctured the canopy, setting aglow the white-pink cherry blossoms that hung on the breeze like lazy snowflakes. Beneath my boots, a satin carpet of fallen flowers slid and shifted. The blossoms in the air reacted to my movements. They spun and twirled away from me in all directions, fluttering off like swarms of dancing butterflies. The blossoms continued to drip from the trees—and they would never stop. That was the magic of Laelia. The everlasting blossoms never stopped falling, not even for a moment. And yet the trees were always full and the ground eternally coated in a layer of petals ankle-deep.
Beyond the cherry blossom trees and the water gardens lay the castle’s tall stone walls and towers. And past the palace grounds, past the temple with its shimmering walls, and past the enchanted woods—there were other cities. Some of those cities on our world even had spas, hotels, and other things that catered to otherworldly tourists. It was all powered by steam, not electricity, which gave this little corner of the galaxy a very nostalgic feel to it. In my totally unbiased opinion, Laelia was the most beautiful world of them all.
“Princess.”
I turned around to find Chimera coming down the path after me. The bronze-haired Phantom had been my combat instructor during my school days, but he worked for my father now as the head of the palace guard. Like every Phantom, he looked strong enough to wrestle crocodiles, but he was actually a pretty cool guy—when he wasn’t kicking my ass, anyway.
I smirked at him. “Chimera.”
A gold spark swirled in his jade eyes. “You have your guilty face on.”
“I don’t have a guilty face.”
“You do,” he told me. “And you’re wearing it right now. Does your father know you were out chasing deranged mages?”
“How did you…” I stopped, narrowing my eyes at him. “You’re not reading my mind, are you?”
Phantoms couldn’t read thoughts, but they could lift images out of someone’s head. I usually had enough mental resistance to block them, but it had been a long morning.
He burst into laughter. “No, I am not reading your mind, Princess. I have, however, read a report of a recent incident on Earth.”
Fantastic. Word sure spread fast. There were too many gossipmongers in the galaxy.
“Your father has been looking for you,” said Chimera.
“Has he heard about the incident?”
“Ask him yourself. He’s waiting for you in the water garden.”
I waved to Chimera, then walked through the gate that led into the water garden. I followed the path past red-gold wood bridges that looped over an interconnected system of streams and ponds. Waterlilies floated on the pale blue surface; fish with shimmering scales swam beneath it. Father stood on one of the bridges, his elbows balanced on top of the handrail.
At over sixty years of age, my father was not a young man, but a human stranger would have placed him closer to twenty than sixty. Mages hardly aged. There were some who were centuries old. Not many, but some. Longevity did not mean we couldn’t be killed by other means.
While not nearly as robust as Jason, my father was no slouch. He still trained each morning, and it showed. His fitted leather ensemble showcased every muscle in his body, which was one reason his negotiation opponents tended to squirm in his presence. The other reason was his eyes, a mesmerizing shade of teal-green. When they looked upon you, you knew you could keep no secrets from him. He would always know. Which was inconvenient when you were his daughter and had more than a few secrets to hide.
Father wasn’t like the witches or the vampires. He didn’t wear expensive, custom-cut silk suits or fur-trimmed cashmere coats. Jewel rings did not adorn his fingers; gold watches did not dangle from his wrists. He didn’t wear diamond brooches or satin sashes either. His boots were leather, but it was a sturdy, practical leather—the kind made for trekking down unbroken paths, not for dancing at balls. And like everything he wore, the dark brown boots were just a little worn around the edges, yet still too new for a pragmatic man to justify throwing them away for the sake of revolving fashion fads.
“Where have you been?” he asked me. My father had two voices. I called them ‘King River’ and ‘Father’. Right now, he was channeling King River, high king of the mages, in all his glory.
“Jason and I were tracking down Vib,” I told him. There was no point in hiding it. He would find out eventually.
“I take it from your expression that you didn’t catch him.”
“No. He got away. He was too well guarded.”
“Tell me about it.”
“He had eight guards, all mages, all with heavily augmented magic.” I paused to gauge his reaction to my next words. “Powerful magic they were using without the help of any accessories.”
Surprise flashed in his eyes, but his voice was as calm as a frozen lake. “That is unusual.”
“Vib is experimenting with potions. And breeding mages. His mages moved like they were all one mind.”
“Did you find anything else?”
“Not yet. Jason sent a team to look through Vib’s lab on Earth,” I said. “And we caught one of Vib’s mages. Jason brought her back to Pegasus for questioning.”
“Terra.”
I knew that tone. A lecture was coming. He was always telling me that I got into far too much trouble whenever I hung out with Jason.
“If you’re going to keep running around with Jason on these missions, you need to be smart,” he said. “You can’t go to Earth to hunt a dangerous criminal without a proper license. The Galactic Assembly’s regulations on that are very clear.”
The Galactic Assembly was the body that regulated portal travel and interworld relations. Father wasn’t scolding me for going out, or even for fighting dangerous criminals. He was scolding me for not doing it right.
“I can’t get a hunting license yet,” I pointed out.
I was too young to take the tests—by about twelve hours. I had to be eighteen to get my hunting license, and my birthday wasn’t until tomorrow.
“You need to be careful, Terra. The Galactic Assembly takes the Veil of Secrecy very seriously, and the regulations surrounding hunting licenses are part of that. If anything had gone wrong, this whole thing would have blown up into one huge galactic diplomatic incident.”
“I know. You’re right. But in my defense, I was just asking the residents of Pacific Sunrise about their missing vegetable gardens. We thought Vib was alone, that we could just go in, and Jason could grab him with no fuss. We had no idea he had his own private army of mages protecting him.”
Father continued to watch me. The look in his eyes made me squirm.
“Ok, I’ll take the tests and get my hunting license as soon as I can get an appointment at the Galactic Transportation Authority,” I promised him.
“And?”
“And I’ll have Jason add my name to the warrant whenever I go hunting with him.”
“Good girl,” he said with an approving nod.
I winked at him. “Only sometimes.”
“You’re older now, Terra,” he said. “A woman, an adult. You’re no longer a child. And you need to start acting your age, not running off with Jason on crazy adventures, not coming home dirty and missing shoes.”
“Hey, I have my shoes this time.” I lifted my feet to show the boots were still attached. “Both of them.”
“You were reckless today, but I must admit that capturing Vib is of utmost importance. He is intel
ligent, resourceful, and quite insane. There’s no telling what he will do out there. As long as he’s free, it’s not just the people of Pegasus who are in danger, but all mages.”
“If only we’d caught him,” I said.
“At least he’s left Earth. Someone will see him and capture him eventually. But not you. Vib is too dangerous. ” He gave me a hard look. “Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“You take the tests for your hunting license and stick to the rules.”
I nodded. “Of course. Always.”
He wrapped his arm around me, leading me toward the palace. “Terra.” His sigh was equal parts reprimand and resignation—with a healthy splash of fatherly pride. “Just promise me that if you absolutely must break the rules, that you don’t let anyone find out about it.”
I held up my hand. “Pinky promise.”
He linked his pinky with mine. “You’d better.”
Father had always said if you’re going to throw yourself into danger, you sure as hell better make sure you were doing it within the rules—and that if you had to break the rules, don’t let anyone find out about it. That philosophy was just one of the many reasons he was the galaxy’s most amazing father.
“You might want to find another friend to hunt down criminals with you. Jason gets you into nothing but trouble.”
“Jason needs me. I find his rogue mages in half the time with half the body count.”
He sighed. “Why can’t you stick to nabbing sane criminals like every other princess? Preferably criminals without their own personal army and military-grade arsenal.”
“What, so no warlords? That’s a shame. I hear there’s a nasty one who’s tearing up Seastone right now.”
“You’re incorrigible.”
“Of course I am. I’m your daughter.” I rose to my tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.
He laughed. “Love you, kid.”
“Love you too.”
He wrapped his arms around me. “Just promise me that you won’t go after any dangerous criminals alone. At least bring Jason along.”
