It would take a city.
Deckard’s heart seized in his chest. This wasn’t a penny-ante gutter mage toying with weapons beyond his ken. This was magic on a scale not seen since the night Atlantis died.
And yet he’d sensed nothing. If Hayden hadn’t brought him an intact box, he’d never have known how bits of the Worm were getting through. Deckard had gone blind and deaf, as well as weak, just as his power was most needed.
But who else was there?
Deckard stared at the young man on the couch. Hayden would live, but could he carry on the work? Did he have it in him? The fool boy always rushed in, bullheaded, when he stood on the cusp of so much more. If only there were time...
Three thousand years of life and Deckard found himself wishing for just one more year. He closed his eyes and breathed. He had no choice. Hayden was as ready as he was going to be. Tomorrow, he’d teach his final lesson.
Tomorrow, he’d finally tell the truth.
Chapter Twenty-One
The song spooled around him with a physical, tactile richness. The melody lilted soft and serene, rolling slowly in gentle waves. The sense of peace surrounding him made him think of home, and he floated in it, thoughts lost in the darkness deeper than time, older than words.
A note of pleading entered the chord, discordant and sharp. The song frayed, ebbing away in a series of crashing, longing echoes. It tore something inside of him as it passed.
He opened his eyes in panic. He could feel the tears on his cheeks. He had to bring it back!
There is a way.
The voice hissed in his ear, low and confident. He looked for the source, but his eyes wouldn’t move. His head nodded without his will.
A different kind of panic shot through Hayden’s mind. He fought to clear the fog from his thoughts.
“How?” The plea rasped from his throat, but this voice wasn’t his either. It was higher, definitely feminine, and laced with desperate sorrow.
Easy. Simple. Like parting silk.
Hayden shuddered. That voice nauseated him, the vocal equivalent of rotten fruit on a golden tray. Maggots covered in velvet. It left a trail of filth on his soul. He flinched away from it instinctively, and that infinitesimal separation gave him clarity.
Details began to fit. He lay in an unfamiliar room, the bed too soft, the scent too floral. The room was lit by a faint glow from nearby. Where was he?
Hands too thin and small to be his lifted bed covers and legs swung themselves to the carpet. “Anything! Make it come back!”
Hayden willed the hands to move, the legs to run away. Instead, the hands curled into clenching fists, and the legs dropped knees to the floor.
All you need is the key.
Hayden felt the voice wrap around his chin and gently push his gaze to the scissors standing in a cubby on the desk.
Hayden screamed in his mind. “NO! Don’t touch it! Run!”
His head shook, and hair spilled across his neck and shoulders. “I’m scared!”
Little lamb. So frightened. Trade fear for peace.
Hayden thrashed, screaming wordlessly. Quivering fingers stretched for the scissors. Hayden searched, frantic, for the source of the words. Cold metal touched the girl’s hands.
That’s it. So simple. See.
Glyphs appeared in the air, a dull red. Atlantean writing. The scissors rose.
Something caught Hayden’s senses, a heat haze in the air touching this girl’s arms.
Trade fear for peace. Blood for the song.
The girl sobbed. Her terror swelled in Hayden’s senses underneath the longing for that music to carry her away again. The haze resolved itself into a mass, black and glistening.
Trade life for eternity.
Screaming, Hayden reached for the Axiom, desperate to stop the makeshift dagger. Pain thundered into him with a roar as the scissors descended.
Hayden came to consciousness on his knees. He fought to rise, but someone held his right arm in a classic bar, raised out and up. He instantly sheathed his arm in energy and jabbed spikes at his captor’s hands, the way he’d practiced a hundred times.
His assailant’s grip loosened with a curse, and he rolled forward to gain some distance. Hayden spun to his feet, raising the dagger in his hand to a guard position along his shielded forearm. He had to finish them quickly. He could still save her. He…
“Hayden!”
Hayden blinked rapidly as the room came into focus. Deckard stood on the living room side of the kitchen, holding bleeding hands up, palms out. He wore flannel pants and a slightly askew robe.
Hayden let the constructs dissipate and stood, panting. He looked around him to see Deckard’s kitchen.
“Hayden?” Deckard repeated, softer, in the tone of a man trying to calm a skittish animal.
“Deckard? What happened? Where’s the girl? Is she okay?”
“Vivian is upstairs. She’s fine, Hayden.”
Hayden grimaced, gaze dancing about. “Not her! The other one! Something was...she was going to kill herself!”
“Hayden. Look at me, son.”
Anger simmered up. Didn’t he hear? A girl’s life was at stake! Hayden glared at Deckard, struggling to control his breathing, fighting down impatience.
Deckard stared back with a mixture of confusion and...fear. Archon was afraid. A chill smothered Hayden’s rising anger. In the same moment, he saw the carvings.
They’d been chiseled into the wood floor in neat, precise strokes. They described two concentric rings of glyphs. Hayden had been in the center of them before rolling out. And he’d had a dagger in his hand.
“Deckard?”
Several glyphs caught his eye. The inner ring held “Fear” and “Blood.” The outer ring held “Peace.” And at the apex of both arcs, overlapping the orbits of both rings, “Life.”
Hayden didn’t remember slumping to the floor, but he looked up as Deckard reached him. His voice whispered out.
“What’s happening to me?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Deckard held his hand against Hayden’s forehead, Axiom blazing in searching light. He scoured the boy’s being for signs of invasion. Nothing. No shard, no outside sorceries. Just...Hayden.
But did he find nothing because there was nothing? Or because he was too weak to see it?
Deckard pushed the thought down and removed his hand, letting go of the Axiom. “I can find no trace of anything sinister.”
They sat on the couch. Lights had been lit, and Deckard had seen to his own wounds quickly. Hayden suffered from something deeper, though.
“Well, how is that possible?” The boy’s face was still pale from the strain of his wounds and the shock of his vision.
Vivian stepped out of the kitchen, skirting around the carvings Hayden had inflicted on the wood floor. She still wore the rumpled clothes she’d arrived in, and Deckard was reasonably certain she hadn’t slept. She delivered a steaming mug of coffee to Hayden, who accepted it with a forced smile.
“Thanks. Sorry to make you play barista when you’re off duty.”
“It’s fine,” she said through a stifled yawn. “I need some too. Mr. Deckard?”
“That would be lovely, thank you.”
Vivian headed back to retrieve more coffee. Her steps stuttered again as she avoided the carved circle as though it were an oil slick. Hayden sipped from his mug, and Deckard regarded the carvings from his seat on the couch. He’d already examined them thoroughly up close.
Cleanly etched in a smooth, perfect circle, the tilt and depth of the marks were even and practiced with no hesitation. That spoke of someone who was intimately familiar with the language, not just the basic shape of the symbols.
To Deckard’s consternation, Hayden had never taken well to Atlantean writing. He understood general meanings and could reproduce the glyphs, but the edges were rough and the method of marking haphazard, amateurish.
In this instance, he had written like a master of Atlantean poetry.
Deckard nodded. “Can you place the girl, the surroundings? Were you seeing the past or the present?”
“I keep reviewing what I saw, but I was looking through her eyes, and the room was dark, except a little light leaking through the blinds. What I could see of the furniture looked present day, maybe.”
“Then that’s where we start.” Deckard stood to his feet. “I’ll scan the city for traces of sorcery similar to what you produced.”
Vivian came back from the kitchen carrying two mugs. “Thank you, Miss Hale. Please leave mine on the table and stay here with Hayden. What I’m about to attempt is delicate, and I will need quiet.”
“Oh, okay.” Vivian shared a glance with Hayden and set one of the mugs down. She stepped over to the couch and sat.
Deckard drew power as he walked across the living room to the carving. It flowed up into him slowly, but with none of the erratic movement that he had experienced before. He filed that fact away for consideration and knelt to one knee just outside the rings. He placed a hand on the symbol for “Life.”
Crafting a spell was much like carving one. Deckard formed the idea of connection, a thread leading from this set of rings to another and filled it with power from the Axiom. He layered that thought over a mental map of the city of Atlanta.
Deckard raised the model of the city to three dimensions. Not just her streets and parks and buildings, but the way wind gusted between structures downtown and the glitter of daylight on the fountains. The sound of traffic and the music of clubs, restaurants, and amphitheaters.
Voices. Voices above all. A cloud of thought, of identity, in a multitude of languages. A chord of four hundred thousand notes.
Deckard held the city in his mind, wrapped the glyph drawings in eldritch power, and commanded the thread to seek. It shot off like an arrow, northeast. His senses followed it, soaring over and through reality in a dizzying rush of color and sound. He would find her. It would only take a moment to…
The thread split. Deckard slowed and looked back. He bade his consciousness rise, flattening the city model. There it was, a branch in the line of connection. As he watched it split again, forking across the city. Four branches, then six, then more.
Eighteen threads crossed his city, ending in eighteen silenced notes. The absence of those voices roared back onto him and flung his mind back along the path.
Deckard’s eyes snapped open. He stood slowly, regaining his bearings. Eighteen wounds bled silence in his mind.
“Deckard? Did you find her?”
“I’m sorry, Hayden.” His voice sounded rough to his own ears. “She’s gone.” Deckard turned back to the couch to see Hayden standing, chugging his coffee. “What are you doing?”
Hayden swallowed the dregs with a grimace and said, “I’m going with you to check out the scene.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I felt her do it, Deckard! I knew it was coming. And the circle?” He gestured to the carving at Deckard’s feet. “I’m up to my neck in this. I can’t just sit this one out. I’m coming with.”
“Hayden. You’re wounded and exhausted. Stay here. I’ll be back soon and…”
“Why are you trying to cut me out of this? Just because I got shot…”
Deckard’s voice growled low in his chest. “Hayden. Stay. Here.”
“Like hell I will!”
Deckard shouted a word and knifed his right hand up, palm in. Invisible forces wrapped Hayden, pinning his arms to his sides, and lifted him a foot off the ground. Hayden spun, legs kicking. Deckard made a snaring motion with his free hand, and bands bloomed around the boy, cinching his legs and arms down. A wide strip covered his mouth.
As he stepped toward his trussed up apprentice, Deckard saw Vivian curled small on the couch and covering her mouth with her hand. He ignored her and spun Hayden to face him, holding onto one glowing band. The boy glared at him, grey eyes thunderous.
Deckard stared straight through the anger. “Listen to me, boy. You almost died tonight. Twice. There is a sorcerer out there who is gaining control of Primes and in turn somehow influencing you.”
Hayden blinked, and his glare subsided. He tried to look anywhere else, but Deckard jerked him slightly to get his attention. “I will not let you waste your potential in some ridiculous attempt to prove yourself or assuage misguided guilt.” He whirled Hayden in midair, facing him toward Vivian, who was still aghast on the couch.
“If you want a weight on your shoulders, there she is. Someone is still trying to kill her, and her own talent makes her vulnerable. Who’s going to protect her? Teach her to defend herself?” Deckard flipped Hayden back to look at him.
“You want to save lives?” He dug a finger into Hayden’s sternum. “Take responsibility for this one.” Deckard shoved the boy backward and released his summoned restraints, dropping him onto the couch.
In the same breath, he called up his armor. Vivian’s eyes went wide as the weight settled on him. Silver chased pauldrons exaggerated his shoulders, and a deep hood shadowed his features. The split tabard fluttered over his shoulders like a priest’s shawl, green and black cloth rich against the glittering breastplate and filigreed gauntlets.
Deckard loomed over the pair of them, the embodiment of ancient knowledge and elemental power. Hayden looked up from the couch with hurt and shame and fierce, fierce pride warring on his face.
“You walk in the halls of sorcerer-kings, Hayden Lucas. Act like it.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Hayden watched through the office window as Archon streaked into the dark of early morning. He hadn’t seen the old man that angry in...maybe ever. Deckard had strolled outside, gathering Vivian in his wake. A couple of minutes later, he’d taken to the skies, leaving Hayden behind.
Ten years of training, and he still felt like baggage, slowing the old man down. He was every bit the hand to hand combatant that Deckard was and Hayden knew he hadn’t hit his limit yet. In everything else…
But Hayden hadn’t been reckless. He’d done his job and kept a civilian safe. True, it had nearly gotten him killed. But wasn’t that the job? Hayden ground his teeth.
The door creaked shut, and he walked back to the living room to see Vivian returning. She carried her purse and the little brown bag from before. She glanced at him and then turned away to set her bag next to Deckard’s cooling coffee cup. Hayden made his way to the couch and slumped into it.
Vivian stood at the table, not looking at him. “I’m sorry if I was in the way. That should have been...well, it seemed like a private thing, so...I’m sorry.”
Hayden snorted out a sour laugh. “Not your fault. Deckard likes to make a point no one misses.”
“How long have you known him?”
Hayden shrugged. “Almost eleven years. Half my life.”
“Is he family?”
“No. Though we fight like it, sometimes. Look, can we talk about something else? Why did he take you outside?”
Vivian turned toward him and “Oh, he, uh...he wanted me to clean out my car. Then he got rid of it.”
Hayden quirked an eyebrow up. “How?”
“He opened a...portal, I guess? He said something about the Aegean Sea.”
Hayden started laughing. Vivian stared at him like he’d lost his mind, which only made him laugh harder.
“I’m sorry!” he chortled. “It’s just...can you picture it? Some bored fisherman out there and whump, here’s a bullet-riddled car doing a double gainer into the ocean off your port bow?”
Vivian shook her head, smiling. “You’re crazy. That was my car!”
Hayden fought the laughter down. “You’re right. You’re right. Sorry.” The silence only lasted a second before Hayden said, “The Russian judge still gives it a four.”
They both laughed,
and the weight in Hayden’s gut lightened when it was over.
Vivian sat down on the other end of the couch and curled her knees to her chest. “Does stuff like that happen all the time?”
“Nah. Deckard doesn’t normally just show off. He saves his best tricks for the bad guys.” And stubborn students.
“Must be hard. Having a superhero for a mentor, I mean. Is that why you started being Arclite?”
Hayden shrugged. “Didn’t start out that way. He started training me to help me deal with night terrors I was having as a kid. Building confidence and control, you know? I guess I got a taste for it. Why do you ask?”
Vivian pushed her hair behind an ear. “Well, you got shot keeping me safe. You barely know me, and you took on two monsters. What kind of person does that?”
“Pretty much every guy trying to impress a pretty girl.”
Vivian blushed faintly but smiled. “I know that. I do. It’s just...what if that’s what Primes are for? You know? Not just Mr. Deckard and you. All of us.”
“Well, then somebody hasn’t read their union guidebook.”
“Sorry, I’m being stupid.” Vivian swung her legs down and began to stand up.
“Hey.” Hayden reached over and touched her shoulder lightly. “You’re not stupid. I’m sorry for implying that.” Vivian turned back toward him, and Hayden let his hand drop.
“It’s not as simple, is what I’m saying. No one knows what Hadron’s motives were. And having new abilities doesn’t make you a better person, right? It just makes you more of what you were before.
“Throw in the Shard that makes Primes go nuts and this hidden sorcerer that has Deckard spooked...I’m not sure giving humanity superpowers was a righteous act, that’s all.”
“What about me? I have powers. What does that make me?” Vivian’s blue eyes shone.
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