Julie leaned against the wall, her arms crossed.
“Where is she?”
She nodded at the balcony door.
I glanced there and saw Erra on the covered balcony, standing with her hands wrapped around herself. Usually she manifested in blood armor, but lately I’d been seeing her in long dresses, sometimes the color of ruby, sometimes white or deep, rich emerald. She wore the red one now.
I left the room and went out on the balcony with her. The Five Hundred Acre Wood spread before us, verdant and filled with life, the trees rising in a solid wall just past the deer fence. My aunt looked tired, her gaze fixed on something distant on the horizon.
For a while we stood next to each other without saying anything.
“You must call your father,” she said.
“No.”
She turned to me. “War is coming. Our enemy is coming.”
“Roland wants to kill me. He wants to murder my child or kidnap him, I don’t think he’s decided which yet. I just found out this morning he’s mobilizing his forces.”
“This is bigger than that.”
“Nothing is bigger than that. I saw a photo of Razer today. He was just a few miles north, in the city limits. He’s here, because my father wishes him to be. That fae wears a coat made of the skins of creatures and people he’s murdered. He isn’t going to add a piece of Conlan’s skin to his wardrobe—”
She reached out and touched my face. Her translucent fingers brushed my cheek, the magic prickling along my skin. She’d punched me with her power almost every week, but her caresses were so rare, I could count them on my fingers. I shut up.
“Stubborn child,” the Queen of Shinar said. “Your world will burn until everything turns to ash. You’ll live through unspeakable horrors. You’ll see everyone you love fall, and you’ll wish you were dead, but you won’t die, because you are the Princess of Shinar, the beacon of your people’s hope, and if you succumb, that hope will perish with you. Your memories will become your torture. You’ll carry that burden with you as you wade through a sea of blood, and when you emerge, you’ll become me, your victory a hollow trinket. I cannot watch you suffer through it. You and that boy are everything I have. You are the family I lost and found. Call your father. Show him the creature. Tell him the yeddimur are here. Together we have a chance. Do that for me, In-Shinar. Do that because I’m your aunt and you love me.”
* * *
• • •
I WALKED OUT of the house carrying my backpack. Curran was still holding Conlan. Derek hosed off the Jeep, while Julie watched with a skeptical look on her face. The four of them looked at me.
“Did you talk to Erra?” Curran asked.
“Yep. Come with me,” I told Derek. “I need your help.”
“With what?”
“With carrying a metric ton of firewood. I’m going to call my father and I need to be out of my territory to do that.”
“Gave her a piece of your mind, did you?” Curran asked. “How did that work out for you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Julie snickered.
“Your mom got her butt kicked,” Curran told Conlan.
“Keep talking, see how that turns out for you.”
Curran grinned. “There you go, Conlan. If your mommy is ever mean to you, snitch on her to your great-aunt and she’ll fix it.”
Conlan giggled.
I growled and got into my Jeep.
* * *
• • •
I STOOD ON top of a low hill and surveyed the pile of brushwood and dead branches Derek and I had arranged into a ten-foot-tall cone. At my back, the sunset died slowly as the sun rolled to the west, behind the city. The rays of the setting sun set the world aglow, and against the curtain of light the ruins of Atlanta stood out, dark and shadowy, a mirage of a safer time.
Hi, Dad, it’s me. I know you’re trying to kill me, my husband, and our son, but guess what, all is forgiven, I need your help. Ugh. I’d rather walk on broken glass.
I was stalling. I came here, I built this damn pyre, I had to get it over with.
“Do we need more wood?” Derek asked.
Ten feet high and about six feet across. Good enough. “No.”
I reached into my pocket, withdrew a packet of dried herbs, pushed a couple of branches aside, and sprinkled it into the middle of the pyre. I replaced the branches, struck a match, and lit the newspaper. The fire gobbled up the paper, jumped to the smaller twigs, and began eating its way through the branches.
The sky was cooling off, darkening from near turquoise to a deeper indigo. Hints of the first stars appeared above us.
I concentrated on the fire, funneling my magic into it. The flames caught the herbs and crackled. Blue sparks shot up from the pyre, and thick aromatic smoke drifted through the air.
I pulled a small vial of my blood from the pouch on my belt and poured a few drops into the fire, murmuring the incantation. Bright crimson burst within the blaze, spreading to envelop the whole pyre in unnatural red flame. Magic pulsed. There. It was done.
The ancient words rolled off my tongue. “Nimrod. Father. I need your help. Please answer.” Well, look at that. I didn’t even choke.
Nothing.
Derek drew back. The hair on his arms was standing up.
“Father, speak to me.”
Nothing.
I switched to English. “Father, we are facing a terrible threat. The yeddimur are here. I need to speak to you. It’s important. Please.”
The flames remained silent.
I sat on the grass.
“Maybe he can’t feel it,” Derek said.
“My family has used this method to communicate for thousands of years. He can sense the fire. It’s like a ringing phone, difficult to ignore. He just decided not to pick up.”
Derek sprawled on the grass next to me, looking into the flames. Most of the time when I looked at him, I saw a man, but right now, with the fire dancing in his eyes, he was a wolf.
“Do you miss him?” he asked.
“Yes. No matter how monstrous he is, he’s still my father. I miss talking to him. When he lived close, I was angry with him, but there were moments when we just talked.”
In those moments, he forgot to be a conqueror and a tyrant. He was just a father, one I never knew during my childhood. And he was proud of me, especially when I managed to stick it to him. I was the child of a monster from a family of monsters. My aunt had burned her way through ancient Mesopotamia. She had committed atrocities and I had learned to love her, too. There was light in Erra. There was also darkness, and when I looked deep into both, I recognized myself.
“Roland loves me as much as he can ever love a child. He just loves himself more.”
“I miss my father,” Derek said. “Before he turned loup.”
After Derek’s father turned loup, he’d raped, killed, and eaten his wife and daughters, until teenage Derek finally snapped and killed him. He was the sole survivor of that massacre, and once he was done, he set fire to the house. That was how the Pack found him, mute and unresponsive by the smoldering wreck of his family home. It took Curran months to coax him back to the living.
“What was he like?” I asked.
“Strict. People said he was a good man. He was scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of everything.” Derek looked into the flames. “The way I grew up, there were Christians and then there was the world. The world was evil and wicked, and only the Christians were good and safe. They talked about it almost as if it were a foreign power out to get them. One time we went to a mountain fair, and a visiting preacher delivered a sermon. He said it was easy to be a Christian when you hold yourself separate from the world, but if you do, there is no temptation, no struggle, and nobody to witness to. That our duty was
to go into the world, holding the light of our faith like a torch, and to help others.”
“Didn’t go over well with your father, did it?” I guessed.
“No. He pulled us out of the crowd and told us the man was a false prophet. Everything of the world was bad: books, toys, school. Anything that conflicted with a clean life.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Christians aren’t the only people who do that. There are shapeshifters in the Keep who never go into the city. They don’t want to interact with anyone who isn’t a shapeshifter. Some people cling to their tribe, Derek. He took good care of you. He must’ve loved you.”
Derek shrugged. “I got the feeling it was less about love and more like a second job. A man works and takes care of his family, so my dad did that, because he was supposed to do it. We were his responsibility, and it was his job to provide and to make sure we turned out good and Christian. The plan was that I would grow up and turn into my dad. Work at a paper mill or, if I got ambitious, learn to weld or be a plumber. Marry some girl, put a trailer on my parents’ land. Have kids. Stay in the mountains with other good Christian folk. Stay safe. I didn’t want to be safe. I wanted to be a sailor.”
“Why a sailor?”
He grimaced. “So I could sail away from the mountains. I wanted more.”
Now he’d gotten more. Way more than he’d bargained for.
“My father never had a lot of patience,” Derek said. “Maggie, my older sister, argued with him. She could argue forever. He’d keep it up for a while, until she got to him, and he’d order her to her room. Then he’d go bust wood in the back, ashamed that he lost his temper. But he never laid a hand on us. After he turned, I saw him fucking Maggie’s corpse.”
My stomach turned. “Loupism drives people insane. You know this.”
“Maybe there was always darkness inside him. Loupism just brought it out into the open.”
“If there was always darkness inside him, he never let you see it. Doesn’t that make him a good man anyway?”
Derek turned to me. His eyes were empty. There was no sadness, no anger, just the watchful emptiness of a predator. I’d seen him do this before. That’s how he dealt with it. He went deep into the wolf.
“Voron was the closest thing to a father I had,” I told him. “He fed me, he taught me. He cared if I lived or died. The witches told me that the only reason he did any of those things was because my mother fried him with her magic. She cooked him until he loved her above everything else. When my father killed her, Voron couldn’t handle it, so he raised me to become a weapon against Roland. Voron wanted to hurt my father. Either I killed my father or he killed me, and either way Voron would be satisfied with the pain he caused.”
Derek waited silently.
“I chose to not worry about it,” I told him. “I filed it away into the same place I keep things like Earth is a globe and ice floats. I’m aware of it, and when I need it, I’ll pull it out and dust it off, but until then I have memories of my childhood when Voron took care of me. They are my memories. I decide how to view them, so I choose to remember him as the man who raised me and taught me to survive. It makes me happier to remember it that way.”
“But is it the truth?”
“I don’t know. He’s dead, so I can’t ask him. You can remember your father as a man who hid darkness inside him, or you can remember him as a flawed man who loved his family and died when loupism took him over. You have to decide for yourself what you can live with . . .”
A flash of white light split the ruby flames of the pyre. I stood up. What do you know, Daddy Dearest decided to pick up the phone after all.
The light coalesced into a man. He wore a long robe with a hood. No, not a robe, a cape, lined with wolf fur and fastened with a thick gold chain across his chest. The white fabric draped his wide shoulders, falling down into the flames.
And he was not my father. Not even a little bit.
The man lowered his hood. He was tall, at least six-six, maybe six-seven. Caucasian. Blond hair falling in a long mane on his shoulders. An ornate torque clasped his neck, heavy with gold. Handsome face, broad, with a square jaw, defined cheek bones, straight nose, and sharp eyes under a sweep of thick blond eyebrows. The eyes stared at me with regal arrogance. The pale blue irises glowed slightly. I couldn’t tell if it was from the flames or if his magic made them luminescent.
He opened his mouth.
Tech crashed into us. The man and the crimson fire vanished. The flames went out, and the pyre collapsed into a heap of ash.
Okay then.
Derek leaned back and laughed.
I gave him my hard stare.
He didn’t even notice. “Does this magic fire come with a warranty, because I think it’s defective.”
“It’s not defective.”
He shook with laughter.
“Go ahead, get your giggles.”
“We drove an hour and a half out here, spent two hours scrounging for wood and building this fire, and we got the wrong guy. Did you screw up the area code?”
“You should take your show on the road. Make some extra money with all these jokes.”
He laughed harder.
“Is this a regular thing? I’m just wondering, did your family usually try to call Attila the Hun and get Genghis Khan instead?”
“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”
“Maybe you should try calling him on a regular phone,” Derek suggested. “I can help you dial the numbers. You know, do the heavy lifting.”
“Will you quit?”
He sprawled on the grass on his back, snorting. “No.”
“I’ll buy you new knives if you shut up.”
“I don’t want new knives. I want my old knives.” He raised his head. “Give me that jerky you hid in the glove compartment and I’ll stop.”
“Deal.”
He rolled to his feet, hauled a drum of water from the back of the Jeep, and dumped it on the ashes. We got into the Jeep and I handed the jerky over. The sounds of a hungry shapeshifter eating filled the vehicle. I steered the Jeep toward Atlanta.
Derek paused his chewing. “That was someone, though. Some god or king or something.”
I nodded. There’d been power in those blue eyes. I would have to ask my aunt if the fire call could be intercepted and who would have the magic to do so.
He chuckled.
“What is it now?”
“You can tell he had a whole speech prepared. Now he’s probably fuming somewhere.”
“That’s what worries me.”
“I’ll always have your back,” Derek said. “Even with creepy magic.”
“I know. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
We rolled toward Atlanta, where isolated electric lights beckoned, promising the illusion of safety.
* * *
• • •
“TELL ME AGAIN about the blond guy,” Curran said.
“Tall. Muscular. Expensive cloak lined with fur and fastened with a gold chain. Full of himself. Perfectly brushed hair.” I drank my tea.
We sat in the kitchen. While I’d been gone, Curran had put our son to bed. He and Julie had already eaten dinner. I grabbed a late bite, too. Julie sat across from me at the table, drinking her own tea. Derek had retrieved his knives from the burnt wreck of the Jeep, had spread a length of canvas on the table, and was painstakingly cleaning them. Most of the blades had made it through the fire, but a couple of synthetic handles had melted.
“Don’t forget the dog collar,” Derek said.
“Not a collar, a torque,” I said. “Collars open at the back. This one opened from the front.”
“What kind of a torque?” Julie asked. “Scythian? Thracian?”
“Heavy, ornate, with three stylized gold claws.”
“
And you’re sure it wasn’t your dad in disguise?” Curran asked.
“Yes. The eyes were different.”
My husband crossed his arms. “How long did you gaze into his eyes, exactly?”
“About three seconds, while I waited for him to speak.” I pointed my teaspoon at him. “I know what you’re thinking. Stop thinking it.”
Julie kept a straight face, but her eyes laughed at me from above the rim of her cup. Derek appeared stoic.
“What am I supposed to think? First, someone sends you a red rose.”
“And a knife. And a box full of ash.”
“Exactly. Is it a threat? Is it a conditional declaration of war?”
I shrugged. “Maybe it’s a gift from a socially awkward horticulturalist.”
Julie laughed into her tea. Derek pretended not to hear, but the corners of his mouth curved up.
“Sure it is. Then you call your dad and some golden-haired pretty boy shows up dressed to impress.”
I waved my spoon. “I agree with you there. Nobody prances around in a fur-lined cloak in the middle of the Atlanta summer with perfectly brushed hair. It looked like he sensed my fire call, put on all of his regal things, prepared a speech, and only then cut in.”
“And then tech hit.” Derek flashed a quick smile.
Curran leaned on the table. “So, you tell me how I’m supposed to feel about that. On top of everything else, your aunt blew up the Jeep and overextended herself.”
My aunt had a very difficult time manifesting during tech, and with most of her power spent on that firebomb, she would be sleeping for a while. I’d tried her dagger when we got home and gotten only silence.
I spread my arms. “How is that my fault?”
“I never said it was. I’m expressing my general frustration with this situation.”
“I’m frustrated, too. I’ve got Serenbe. Two hundred people are gone, and their families have no answers. I’ve got dead Mr. Tucker, Yu Fong in a coma, ancient creatures popping out of my aunt’s nightmares and attacking us, my dad mobilizing, and on top of that there is a fae assassin running around in our city likely hoping to kill you, me, or our son, preferably all three. My cup runneth over and I have zero answers. Zilch. Nada.”
Magic Triumphs Page 11
