by Jenn Stark
“But the way is not clear, and it grows darker the farther away you will travel.” His words echoed Ma-Singh’s, and I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “Which is not as it should be. The world as we have protected it must always be pierced with light, even if by mortal standards it seems impossible. This…is something different. And something I cannot pierce.”
“Well, I’ll keep you posted. It’s Mexico, not Atlantis. You’ll always be able to find me, even when I don’t want you to.” I shot him a knowing look, yet my words made Armaeus grow more somber.
When he leaned toward me, I edged away. I couldn’t take the touch of his lips on me—not on my forehead, where my third eye was peeled wide as if I’d never see the Magician again, and definitely not on my lips. It felt too much like good-bye, and suddenly it was very important that this not be good-bye. Not here.
He straightened, his gaze unreadable, but I couldn’t keep my cool. My voice cracked as I spoke.
“You owe me way more than a send-off in a hospital lobby,” I whispered. “I should at least get flowers.”
Armaeus inclined his head, but his reply was interrupted by the sound of the opening door. Nikki strode out, her head swinging around. “You should come back,” she said, her words curt as she approached me.
“Sure, I just—” When I turned back to face the Magician, he was gone.
“I…right,” I said, looking around the room. Fortunately, the kid was gone as well. I couldn’t face the idea of babysitting him tomorrow, let alone tonight. How on earth was I going to travel with a child? The answer was—I couldn’t. There was simply no way. That child needed to be cared for by the Magician, or at least by Father Jerome.
Martine had given me everything I needed, anyway. I’d head to the Mexico City arcane black market, find the Birdhouse or whatever it was, and see where my third eye took me. My eyes and my cards. It was a good combination.
Feeling suddenly cheered, I squared my shoulders and turned to Nikki. “How’s he doing?” I asked.
“He’s…” She grimaced. “Well, he’s not good. Which is weird. Everything we saw in Father Jerome’s kids indicated that the reactions took several weeks if not months to set in. Brody started failing in about fifteen minutes. I don’t get it.”
“I don’t get it either,” I said, but something in her words gave me pause. “Of course, he’s not a child. That might be the key.”
“But they’re giving the drugs out to adults in those clubs. They had to be formulating them for adult usage. How badly does a kid need to grow younger?” As she talked, we pushed through to the next hallway, which was as spotlessly white as the first. “So, what, did he get a weaponized version? Also, he’s Connected, at least somewhat—and the blast made him more so. According to Dr. Sells, Detective Delish is like you said: better, stronger, faster…and damned near dead.”
I jolted. “What?”
“See for yourself.” She pushed open the last door, and we stepped into an intensive care unit. Instantly, a nurse handed us masks, but I ignored her and moved forward to Dr. Sells, who was standing beside Brody’s bed, gazing down at him. I stared, shocked. His face was covered with an oxygen mask, and his skin was the color of cement. On the nearest monitor, his heart rate was hammering at a cool two hundred and twenty beats per minute.
“What’s happening to him?” I asked sharply, and Dr. Sells roused herself.
“I don’t know. We’ve tried to slow his heart with chest massage, cooling treatments, but I’m unwilling to try medication because I’m not sure how it will interact with whatever he’s ingested. We’re analyzing the white pills now, but that will take time.
“Time doesn’t seem to be on our side right now.”
“The strangest part is—he’s smiling.” She shook her head. “We’ve even caught him laughing, though he’s unresponsive to external stimuli. I don’t know why. But he seems actually happy.”
Immediately, Martine’s words sprang into my mind. “My heart gets too happy, and I have to tell it to sleep.”
I pushed Dr. Sells out of the way, then shoved the oxygen tube to the side, clearing a space above Brody’s chest. Ignoring the bleats of the doctor and her nurses, I placed my hand on his chest. Sure enough, Brody’s heart was pounding a million beats a minute, and I suddenly felt like I was too far away from him—too far.
I leaned down more closely, then turned my head, resting my cheek upon his sternum, curling my hand behind his back.
“Rest,” I whispered, reaching out with my heart, my mind, with every connection point I’d ever had to Brody, every point I ever would. My third eye opened wide, but whatever had afflicted Brody’s aura before was now vastly outweighed by this new threat. Everything about him was caught up in a driving, thumping race, each beat coming more rapidly than the last.
“Rest,” I urged again, breathing against his chest. “Your heart will sleep and dream, your joy will wait for you, but not now—not now. Now is the time for rest. For sleep. Even the happiest of hearts must stop their dancing.”
Everything quieted around me, except for the thudding of Brody’s heart. It thrummed and jackhammered and banged against my ear, but I never stopped my litany of rest, never stopped reaching out. Never stopped…
I don’t know how long I was at it. I only knew that when I awoke, the room was dark and still, the monitors chirping and tweeting in a soft chorus around us. Beneath my cheek, Brody’s chest rose and fell with quiet regularity, his heart finally slowed to a reasonable pace. I lifted my face, and for a long moment, I just watched him sleep.
Across the room, Nikki sighed heavily. “I love you guys,” she whispered.
Chapter Twenty-One
The generals of the House of Swords assembled in Soo’s desert mansion, led by Ma-Singh. I would always think of this house as Soo’s, I decided, though Nikki had put her indelible stamp on the sections she’d claimed for her own. It was too large and rambling for me, roaming down endless corridors and into dozens of high-windowed rooms, their filtered shades doing all they could to bank both the heat and light from outside. Like everything else Soo favored, the house was big, complex, and damned near impregnable. Exactly like the organization she’d built so carefully, brick upon brick.
Now I sat at the head of the long table of men and women dedicated to the safety of the House, and tried to figure out how exactly I’d gotten myself here. And how I could possibly keep all of them safe.
Ma-Singh summed up his report. “The Revenants have signed the coalition agreement with our House, accepting our protection in return for serving as observation outposts at their discretion.” He held the gazes of the other generals steadily, then stated the obvious. “Very lenient terms, but we are interested in building their trust, not their fear or dependence.”
The group was too well trained to raise an objection on this matter, mainly because the arguments had already been waged. And I’d conceded on enough other points that they were mollified.
One of those points was Ma-Singh’s next topic. “Recruitment efforts for trained warriors have entered phase one. Early response has been strong. Training will commence in waves once initial applicant pools have been culled.”
He gestured to the woman beside him, a stiff-spined Nigerian who probably would have been a warlord in another lifetime. She nodded, giving her report as well in English. “Per protocols, we are pulling half males, half females, then separating only according to skill. Fighting abilities are not a problem, but we are looking to increase our numbers of technologically savvy recruits.”
“Our issue is the opposite.” This man, a tall, angular Norwegian, could have been a vampire—or an elf. He was that preternaturally beautiful and pale. “Technology recruitment is at capacity but weapons training is sadly lacking. We’ll expand our territory to include neighboring sectors.”
The other reports were a mix of positive and negative, though I could tell by Ma-Singh’s expression that he was pleased. Soo had been tapering down the size of her
fighting force in the past few years, mainly because, I suspected, she’d lost control of it. But there were too many members of the House of Swords in imminent danger of a flash attack from Gamon now. If I didn’t root out the source of this new drug…
Ma-Singh turned to me, interrupting my thoughts. “Your request to target Connecteds has yielded positive results as well, though more slowly.”
“Keep trying.” I’d been shocked to discover how few members of the House’s protectors were even low-level Connecteds. That was going to change, especially since—though Ma-Singh had not tacitly acknowledged this to the other generals yet—the charter of the House was expanding to include their protection. That was our deal. I expanded our scope, he got to expand his forces. I wasn’t sure it was the right equation, but it was all I could do right now.
He nodded, then moved to the more traditional opponents in the war on magic, starting with the quasi-military, quasi-religious organization that wanted to see an end to anything not of this earth—and not exclusively of their God. “Surveillance on SANCTUS has proven more fruitful as well, but the news is not good. The organization has reestablished a base in Vatican City, though it is no longer under the tacit direction of the Holy See. They have also instigated meetings with Interpol.”
I winced. “Do we know why?”
“We do not. Our current speculation is that the recent interest of Interpol in the technoceutical trade has alerted them to the existence of the broad reach of the arcane black market and some of its key players. SANCTUS, with its historical charge of rooting out the non-secular threats to its religious credo, is well positioned to offer them historical data on the growth and development of Connected societies, presumably emphasizing their danger to the non-Connected public. While Interpol is in no way a threat on its own to Connected communities, they, of course, have relationships with local government and law enforcement agencies throughout the world.”
“And Gamon’s given them the perfect length of rope to hang everyone by,” I said, following Ma-Singh’s line of thought. “This new drug, Fountain. It’s flooding the market through Connected channels, but because it’s not specifically tied to Connected abilities, it has a broader scope. Everyone wants to turn back the clock, which means everyone’s willing to try it—or at least to test it, which we can already see is not going well.”
Ma-Singh nodded. “Cases involving the drug are starting to bubble up in law enforcement and medical communities, though not yet in a concerted fashion in traditional or social media, except on the deep web. However, its growing incidence rate will eventually filter up to more mainstream search engines. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“Where are we on drug analysis?” I asked. The faster we figured out what this stuff was made of, the faster we could destroy it.
He shifted uneasily. “Per your instructions, we have enlisted the assistance of Simon of the Arcana Council and his team of researchers. The exact chemical process is still impossible for us to replicate or even fully understand—there are elements for which there are no testing standards. Not even Simon can crack it, which has led him to speculate that it’s…” Ma-Singh grimaced, clearly at odds with the Fool on this conclusion. “…a compound not strictly of this world.”
I looked at him sharply. “Like, what. Unobtainium?”
Ma-Singh didn’t appreciate my comment. He rarely did.
“It’s not a viable theory,” he said sternly. “However, one possibility is that the element was culled from asteroids discovered in prehistoric dig sites. Then again, it could be something created by an ancient alchemical process we simply are not privy to. We don’t understand it, which is the primary issue, and studying the end product isn’t going to get us there in time. We need source material.”
“We’ll get it,” I said. My stomach knotted just thinking about what must be going into a drug strong enough to change someone’s cellular makeup. There were some things that were meant to be unleashed into the world, and some things that were not. Just looking at the mad rush of buyers to this untested, unsafe drug was enough to convince me of that. It was bad enough what the hyper-rich were ingesting, smearing on, and injecting into themselves in an eternal search for eternal youth—this went way beyond superficial facial and skin treatments. This was screwing with humanity at a fundamental level, and that was a very slippery slope.
Beyond that, who knew what Gamon’s end game was? The deaths of the Revenants continued to disturb me. There were simply too many of them who’d died in that first attack. It wasn’t efficient. Whereas in Japan, only the targeted children had been killed. That…didn’t add up. Why was there a different attack approach?
What did Gamon really want?
Ma-Singh’s rumble cut across my thoughts. “We’ve deployed observation teams under the direction of the priest in Paris. With so few Connecteds in our ranks, it will be difficult to infiltrate psychic communities, but we expect to have teams in place in the next few weeks.”
I didn’t ask how much that maneuver was going to cost us. For one thing, I didn’t want to know. For another, I didn’t care. I couldn’t sit on the House’s enormous coffers and let people continue to be abducted and killed in pursuit of the arcane black market’s endless search for riches. Gamon wasn’t the only threat these people had faced over the centuries, but she was the face of their terror now. I could do something about that—I had to.
“Make sure you or your designees authorize all acts of force among your teams, no matter how small,” I said, sweeping the room with my gaze. “I don’t want to incite violence among these communities.”
A dozen sets of coolly competent eyes stared back at me. I couldn’t read their expressions, and though I didn’t doubt their loyalty, I could only imagine what they thought of me. I had no training in administration or warfare—and clearly no concern for budgeting. I was a Connected, clearly so—and that had to be strange for them, didn’t it?
Beside me, Ma-Singh’s gaze also seemed to rest on the assembly. He directed a question to the table. “Any disruptions so far?”
A general at the far end, an older Japanese man with a lined face but fiercely cold eyes, spoke up. “The attack on the Revenant community in Tokyo has not gone unnoticed by the other Connecteds of the city. It’s causing unrest. They were aware, of course, of the recluses near the Meiji Jingu shrine, but not the size of the community. I fear we will see more of this in the coming weeks—groups of people who have spent generations believing themselves to be isolated, realizing how close they are to similar groups.”
“Is that a problem?” I asked.
“In theory, no,” the old general answered as Ma-Singh stood and moved to a side table. “But it does underscore the need for careful watch. If these groups decide that we cannot adequately combat this new threat, they may band together and resist the intercession of non-Connected aid. That would leave them at significant risk.”
“They’ve spent centuries surviving by hiding,” I said, turning the idea around in my mind. “But this is a different world, linked in ways never before possible. If they thought they could stage an action on their own…”
Connecteds were by and large sensitives. In monsters like Gamon, that sensitivity had been funneled and honed into a brutal weapon, but for most of the community, the extreme empathy their abilities gave them blunted their effectiveness as warriors. The exceptions tended to be among arcane black market finders and the handful of assassins I’d encountered over the years.
“They’d be slaughtered,” another general said, finishing my thought aloud.
The elder general nodded. “Without training, most certainly. And we have trained very few Connected warriors. It will take time to perfect the process.”
Ma-Singh spoke from the side of the room. He was fussing with a long jade box. “Time is not a luxury we have, unfortunately. Instead, we can rely on loyalty and dedication to the cause of protecting our own leadership—and those like her.”
I frowned
at the strange intensity of his words. Working with the cast of generals was a careful balance, and I didn’t want to push my agenda too far, too fast.
Then Ma-Singh turned, and my words of conciliation died in my throat. He walked over to me almost casually, handing me the wrapped packet he held. I knew without asking what it was.
The power of the Gods’ Nails radiated through their meager silk covering, but the transfer of the artifacts to my hands caused no ripple of uneasiness in the group. They caused enough in me to cover anyone else, of course. Immediately upon handling them, I felt the surge of electricity roll through me, and the base of my palms ached with a keening sense of loss. Apparently, they missed being pierced through to the bone. I shuddered just thinking about it.
“Madam Wilde has not been trained in our ways, but she is a warrior,” Ma-Singh continued. He gestured to me meaningfully, and I stared at him. Surely, he couldn’t want me to uncover the nails in front of his generals. We still didn’t understand their long-term impact, but we’d seen the short-term version.
At his glare, though, I unwrapped the silk, laying the nails bare. Of their own volition, my hands covered the bases of the long strips of sharpened bone, allowing the cruel tips to extend through my two center fingers.
To their credit, the generals did not show any reaction to this move, or to the artifacts themselves. The bones seemed to melt into my skin ever so slightly, but I focused my mind on keeping them out of my skeleton. That required my full attention, so I nearly missed Ma-Singh’s next words.
“Madam Wilde will undertake great risk to preserve and protect our House and those to whom it has sworn allegiance. It is only appropriate that we will undertake a personal pledge to preserve and protect her, as well. As we have protected our leaders throughout the long tradition of the House of Swords.”
