by May Dawney
“Everything?”
Alena chuckled. “Can you be a little more specific?” She glanced over her shoulder.
Claire nodded. “Um. May I ask what a wild mage is?”
Alena sighed. “Yeah, sure. A wild mage is someone connected to the chaotic energy of the Veil. They’re incredibly rare and incredibly dangerous. As far as we know, not a single wild mage has ever survived their manifestation…until now.”
“Oh.” Claire frowned. “Why?”
“The Veil is powerful.” Alena shrugged. “During a manifestation, a wild mage’s connection to the Veil is switched on like a light. They’re suddenly filled with magical energy and none have had formal training in channeling it. They can’t discharge the energy back into the Veil, so they burn out in a release of magical energy; themselves, and every atom around them. It’s a small miracle no one died during Ania’s manifestation, but unless we get her under control, she will undoubtedly kill someone in the future.”
Claire swallowed down a bundle of nerves that seemed to constrict her throat. “That sounds bad.”
“Yeah, it is—sort of.” Alena scooped ice-cream into two bowls. “So, we’re scrambling. That’s why we flew you in: Madame Stravinsky knows more about the Otherworld and the Veil than any of us combined. We need regular access to her and Kath—the host before you.” Alena clenched her jaw. “She couldn’t host her anymore. We weren’t in a big hurry to replace her—Madame Stravinsky has been testing out new hosts for a month—but then this happened and well, here you are.”
A nervous darkness seemed to have taken up residence inside her gut. “Right.” Claire cleared her throat to get the rasp out of it. “Here I am.” She forced a smile onto her features. The reminder that she wasn’t really all that special weighed her down again. “So, you want the uh, wild mage—Ania—here, to keep her safe? Like On and myself?
Alena hummed. “Her, the people around her…” She rinsed the scoop. “That, and there is a war on. It’s been on for centuries, but things haven’t been going well for us for about a hundred years or so. The Inquisitio’s constant hunt and their efforts to silence every mage voice are paying off. Less people are drawn to exploring their abilities—are aware of their abilities, even—and we lose numbers every year due to old age and witch hunts. Long story short: they’re winning. In thirty, forty years, the Society could be gone. It’ll have been wiped out.”
Claire dropped her head. “That’s horrible.”
“It damn well is.” Alena put the ice-cream scoop down with a little too much force. Her shoulders had squared.
“So, why was everyone so angry and uncomfortable by the end of the meeting? Doesn’t everyone want Ania to come here?”
Alena took a deep breath and forced her shoulders down. “The Inquisitio knows Ania’s in Kraków, Poland. They’ve sent someone to collect her.”
“Oh. That’s bad, isn’t it?”
Alena hummed. She put the tub back in the freezer. “Yeah.”
Claire watched Alena collect a banana from the fruit basket and peel it. “So…why was everyone mad at each other?”
Alena seemed to hesitate. “When Ania’s powers manifested, we knew the Inquisitio would try to find her body. From what we’ve learned about wild mages, their body remains intact upon manifestation. It’s just their lifeforce that is shredded. We didn’t want to give either the police or the Inquisitio access to the body for various reasons, so we contacted our closest agent to get the body out. That agent was Noah Otieno.”
She said the name as if it should ring bells for Claire, which it obviously didn’t. “Who’s that?”
“Noah’s one of us, a mage, but not all mages are part of the Society. Some are free agents, like Noah. They don’t abide by all of the laws, but most try to stay on our good side.” Alena cut the banana up into slices.
“But not Noah?”
“She usually does, save for a few minor infractions. We trusted her with the job, that’s not the issue, but the job got complicated.”
“Because Ania’s alive?”
“Because of who’s tracking them.”
Claire frowned. “I-I don’t understand.”
Alena divided the slices between the bowl. “Twenty years or so ago, Noah met another mage. They hit it off, fell in love, whatever. Noah was a member of the Society at the time, the other mage wasn’t.”
“Why wasn’t he?”
“She. Her name is Viktoria Wagner.” Alena glanced at her as she reached into an overhead cupboard for a squirt bottle.
A horrible blush settled on Claire’s cheeks again. Noah and Viktoria. Both women. Much gay. Right. “Oh. That’s okay, right?” She almost didn’t dare look up.
“I don’t have a problem with that. At all.” She looked away. “The Society doesn’t either. We don’t care who people sleep with. The problem was that Wagner is a descendent of one of the—if not the—most powerful Inquisitio bloodlines.”
“Oh.” The realization dawned, and her eyes widened. “Oh!”
Alena chuckled and squirted chocolate sauce into the bowls. “Exactly. Viktoria was eighteen at the time, and a mage, so technically, she qualified for Society membership. There is an interview—call it a hearing—where the mage who wants to apply states their intentions and vows loyalty. Wagner did all that. It’s supposed to be a formality, but my father and Madame Stravinsky overruled the Counsel and rejected her application. It was unheard of and it upset the whole mage world. People left the Society, others spoke out in support of my father and Madame Stravinsky, there were even a few fights.”
“Oh. That’s so sad.”
Alena put the squirt bottle back in the cupboard. “I was a kid, I don’t remember much of it. I do know that in retrospect, more people started to doubt the decision to keep Wagner out. She returned to the Inquisitio and became one of its best and most ferocious hunters. She leads the Swiss House of Inquisition since her father’s passing and she’s directly responsible for a great number of captures. We’ve come to call her arrest teams ‘death squads.’ You met one of them earlier today.”
A shudder went through Claire’s body. “S-She sent those men?”
“Uh-huh.” Alena nodded and pulled two spoons from a drawer. She pushed one into the ice-cream in each bowl. “Either by accident or design, Viktoria Wagner is in Kraków, hunting down the wild mage.”
“D-Does Noah know?”
Alena turned and carried the bowls over. She put one in front of Claire and sat down beside her with her own. “Enjoy. And no, she does not. That’s exactly what the argument was about—do we or do we not tell her who’s hunting her down.”
Claire pulled out her spoon. “Who wants to tell her and who doesn’t?”
“Can’t you guess? My father and Madame Stravinsky want to keep the information from Noah, everyone else at the table want to tell her.” Alena took a bite.
“And you…?” She stirred her ice-cream.
Alena shrugged. “Tell her, I guess. She’s old and wise enough to make up her own mind.”
“Does…does your father think she’s still loyal to um, Wagner?” She glanced at Alena from the corner of her eye.
“She probably isn’t, but Noah’s a bit of a loose cannon, and I think she holds a grudge. We call her in for special assignments, and she just so happened to be closest to the manifestation site, so we asked her to retrieve the body. Lo and behold, it wasn’t that simple.” Alena chuckled dryly. “They doubt Noah would hand the wild mage over to the Inquisitio. She’d be signing her death warrant and she knows it. Wagner is an especially ruthless hunter but knowing Wagner is involved, and knowing their history, it’s another reason my father and Madame Stravinsky want her to bring the wild mage in ASAP. I guess they just don’t want to complicate the situation for Noah so they can be sure she comes in.”
Claire fell silent. She took a small bite as she pondered the situation, then frowned at the odd substance of the ice-cream as it hit her tongue. English ice-cream must be differen
t from American and French ice-cream. It wasn’t bad, at least. “You said…you said there is a war on, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Roos said that…that both sides want Ania to help them?” She checked on Alena to see if she’d gotten Roos into trouble.
Alena stared into her bowl and toyed with a banana slice. “Right.”
“How can one person make such a difference?”
“Well…” Alena trailed off. She gathered a bite, then let it slide off her spoon again. “We’ve been talking about a last stand for years, but since it’s a suicide mission against their numbers—even with our magic—we haven’t done it. We just have endless meetings and nothing happens.”
“You don’t agree?”
“There is a lot at stake, obviously. My father wants to rally everyone—he’s been trying to for years—but most mages have passive powers. There might be five or six thousand of us in the world right now, but only twenty percent or so has magic that can directly harm another. Most magic is passive; scrying, hiding, things like that. People like Ndulu would have to put themselves in the thick of it and take a lot of risks for not too much of a reward. Without the wild mage…”
“You don’t think you can win?” Claire scooped up a banana slice and chewed on it.
“I hate to admit it, but no, I don’t think we can. Even if we were somehow able to harm the top people in the Inquisitio, they’re well-organized. Others would take their places.” She shook her head. “They’ve been patient for centuries. A big cull every few hundred years or so, an iron-clad PR campaign, and now there is no way for us to recover. Every cull ended a few of the bloodlines, every death or vanishing takes DNA out of the pool. Not everyone in the lines develops magic.” She dug the spoon in. “Evolution is against us, and soon we’ll be gone. In my lifetime, maybe the next, if we’re lucky. All it takes is one more cull—or a wild mage.”
Claire frowned. “How could one wild mage decide the war?” She scraped chocolate syrup off her ice-cream and sucked on the spoon.
“They have Veil magic. The reason they always—well, nearly always now—die on manifestation is because they channel raw energy, and in an endless supply, as far as we can tell. If the Inquisitio gets access to the wild mage, they could manipulate the Veil directly. They could seal it and take our magic away like that.” She snapped her fingers. “They wouldn’t even have to fight the rest of us, they could just end it; cut us off. It would be done.”
“And the Society? They’ll use her as a weapon?” She didn’t like the thought of that, but the alternative, the end of magic, was that better? She inspected Alena’s profile. Alena seemed to think it was. Claire tried to imagine how it would feel, to have a part of her taken away forever, something that was an intrinsic, biological part of her.
“They will.” Alena nodded. Then she shrugged. “It is how it is. If we want to stand a chance, we have to use the wild mage.”
“How? How can she win the war for you?” Claire forced herself to eat again.
Alena shrugged. “I don’t know. Smarter minds than me will have a go at that. But even if we just send her into battle, protected by a bunch of elementalists and shifters, she’ll wipe them out. There is no stopping a wild mage—they never run out of energy, unlike the rest of us poor magically inclined folk who have to work hard to channel our energy.” Alena stuck her spoon into the ice-cream and turned to her.
Claire, suddenly nervous, put her spoon down and mirrored her.
“We’d find a way to use her unique talents. It’s not pretty, but it is the only way we can be sure we’ll live and thrive.” She took Claire’s hands.
Claire glanced down at them and felt herself heating up again. Warmth radiated off Alena’s skin, but the heat she felt was all internal.
“Imagine what we could do for the world, Claire, if we could come out into the open.”
Claire struggled to look back up, to meet Alena’s focused gaze. It was hard to hear her over her pounding heart.
Alena smiled and squeezed her hands. “We could heal the sick and solve crime instantly by looking back in time to see what transpired. We could prevent deaths by predicting natural disasters like floods and earthquakes and advise governments on safe zones. Some of us can detect lies and dishonesty; we could vet people in power to make sure their conscience is clear and their intentions noble. We could bring water to parts of the world that suffer from drought, we could refreeze the bloody polar icecaps if they’d only let us! Claire, we could literally save the world if we could be out in the open! The Inquisitio is the only thing that stands between us and salvation. Tearing them down is not only about our right to be who we are, it’s about creating a better world. Don’t you want a better world?”
“I…yeah, I guess? I mean, that does sound good…” Alena’s spirited words seemed to have made hers disappear. That, and the way she rubbed her thumbs over Claire’s skin.
“You don’t sound convinced.” Alena chuckled and let her hands go.
Claire’s heart plummeted. “I—”
“No, I get it, that’s okay. You’re new and I get that it sounds a little out there. Obviously, we’d need to grow, and people would have to trust us. It’s a utopian worldview, but it’s possible, I promise.” She took a new bite, then waved the spoon around to indicate the whole of the Den. “That’s what we’re capable of if we’re not forced to lock ourselves away in holes like this.”
“It’s…It’s not that I don’t believe you. It’s just…I didn’t even know magic existed yesterday. I can’t imagine it can be so…world changing.” She swirled her spoon through the melting ice-cream. She suspected it was dairy-free because it wasn’t behaving exactly like regular ice-cream would. That, or magic that potentially lingered in the Den affected it somehow.
“It can be, but they won’t let us.”
“Why not?”
“Jealously. Fear. There is the whole ‘draining the world beyond the Veil’ thing, of course, but I also think they fear us and what we can do. That’s why people like Wagner have been forced into hiding their powers. Or at least, they used to. I have no idea what’s happening with Wagner right now.”
“Have you ever met her? Wagner?”
“No. I was younger than you are now when she moved in Society circles, and I don’t remember. I just remember the fallout.” She shook her head.
Claire took another bite to occupy her mouth with. Her mind swam. It had been a long and strenuous day and she was in way over her head. Once she swallowed, Alena was still deep in thought. “Will Ania stay here when she arrives? Like, indefinitely?”
Alena shrugged. “At least for now. Like I said, if we can get her battle-ready, the Inquisitio wouldn’t stand a chance. She’d blow through a death squad as if they were made of paper.”
“But…won’t that hurt them?”
“Of course it would, Alice.” Alena rolled her eyes. “That’s the point. You need to understand that you would have been dead or forever in a coma or something if the Inquisitio had gotten a hold of you. They stop at nothing, and they’re systematically wiping us out—like rats.” She pushed her bowl away. “It’s a war, okay? A bloody war, and there will always be casualties. Inquisitio Bloodline—those born into Inquisitio Houses—and mages who sympathize with their cause, they all have blood on their hands. I’m not against leveling the playing field. Are you?”
Alena’s gaze was as sharp as daggers. The answer was obvious, even though it chafed against her conscience. “N-No.” Claire made herself a little smaller in her chair. “Not against.” Truthfully, she didn’t understand enough of what was going on to form an educated opinion.
“Good.” Alena took a deep breath and nodded. “Remember: they started it.”
Claire nodded. “I will.” Her heart rabbited inside her chest. The urge to flee the room and Alena’s intensity were overwhelming. Instead, she drew her legs up like a shield.
Alena turned more securely toward her. “Look, none of this concerns y
ou, okay? In a few months, once the tests start coming back bluer and bluer, you’ll be out of here like all the others. You don’t have to understand. Just don’t make my life hard while you’re here, okay? It’s a messed-up time, and you’re not here to take part. Remember that too.”
Claire nodded. “G-Got it.” She wasn’t going to cry, even though her insides had been jolted as if Alena had slapped her. She sucked in a breath. “I’m pretty sleepy again…”
Slowly the intensity drained out of Alena’s gaze and she leaned back in her chair. “Yeah, understandable. Do you need me to help you get to your room?”
Claire pushed her chair back. “No, I think I know where it is.” She stood and found her legs to be cooperative. “Yeah, I’m good. Um, thank you, for getting me out of the meeting and for the ice-cream. It’s a little—”
“Weird? Yeah, sorry. Mages are vegans. It helps us channel. You’ll get used to it, or we can buy you some of the real stuff?”
She shook her head. “No, that’s fine. It’s nice. And I appreciate it.”
Alena met her gaze. “Try to get some sleep. Don’t worry too much about the Inquisitio and Wagner and everything. It’s just how it is right now, but the odds are good you’ll never see its conclusion. You’ll just host a couple more times, eat ice-cream, read a lot, and before you know it, you’re done.”
Claire could tell Alena was trying to comfort her, but the words just created a hollowness inside of her. She nodded. “Okay.”
“Oh, before I forget—here.” Alena reached inside her jacket pocket and pulled the little book Mr. Senna had handed her out of her pocket. “Dad wants you to read this. It’ll help you understand. There is stuff about the Veil and wild mages in there.” She shrugged. “Consider it required reading.”
Claire accepted the book and pressed it to her chest. “Thank you.” There was nothing more to say, so after a second of hesitation, she walked out. Despite her better judgment, she was a little disappointed Alena didn’t call her back.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
