He chuckled.
Their easy friendship gave me hope. When I looked at them together, I saw a future I wanted for all of us, but it was one I felt afraid to dream. We might make it, but we wouldn’t get out from under unscathed.
Where the Order was concerned, no one ever did.
I’d been the Order’s number-two assassin for years, sneaking into the homes of targets, invading minds with my magic, using my power to take out the targets I’d been assigned. I’d had a one-hundred-percent follow-through rate on all of my missions, except the last one.
The Order had assigned me a family. Mother, father, kid. I’d murdered the female target in her sleep. Her husband hadn’t been so lucky. He’d awakened before I could slip into his mind and take him peacefully, so he got a bullet for his trouble. The child had been the problem.
The child had been Faith.
She’d been like me when I was small. Her parents hadn’t understood her gift. They’d hurt her. Locked her away. They’d tried to make her normal and, when they’d failed, they hid her. God only knew what they might’ve tried next.
I couldn’t take her life myself, and I couldn’t leave her there for the follow-up team to come along and finish the job. That left only one choice. I slipped away in the night, leaving the Order behind, taking Faith with me.
For the longest time, she hadn’t known the circumstances under which I’d “adopted” her. She’d chosen to believe that I’d saved her from the Order operative who’d been sent to kill her. I’d shattered that belief, that innocence, a month ago because I’d had no choice. Now that Faith knew the truth, she’d accepted it as much as she could.
Some days, she blamed me. Other days, she clung to me. I was all she had, and she knew I felt the same.
We needed each other.
I pulled out a chair from the dinette. I pointed at Faith, then at the seat.
She hesitated. “There’s a man coming.”
“Another Order operative?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
We’d expected this. The Order had tracked us here. They’d sent assassins after us. We’d taken them out. They’d send more.
“Just the one?” Red asked.
Faith nodded. “It’s who he is that’s the problem. Him. His magic.”
Red sipped his coffee. “The man’s magic is the problem? Or he’s the problem, himself?”
“Both,” Faith said. “It wasn’t just the cards that said so. I also got messages while I was reading. You know, from…”
She trailed off.
I’d been in the process of lifting my mug to take the first sip. I lowered it slowly, and couldn’t help notice that my hand trembled slightly as I did. I finished her sentence in my silent voice.
The Awakened.
Faith’s magic had a source unlike any other I’d ever heard of before—a god that was a part of her soul. No one knew much about this god other than that it was very old and that it slept inside the soul of a human being, passed down through the generations via reincarnation. It would wake from its slumber at some point. No one knew when. What it might do afterwards was a mystery as well—one that even the Angel of Death seemed to fear.
If Faith was receiving messages from the sleeping god while doing a routine divination reading—that meant trouble, any way we sliced it. I wouldn’t tell her it was all right, or act as if it was somehow normal or expected. After the business of withholding how she’d come to be with me, I wouldn’t lie to her again.
I reached across the table and covered her hand with mine. She seemed to breathe a little deeper. Sit a little easier. I needed to be steady for her. If I was going to freak out, I’d have to do it on the inside.
Red set his cup down on the table and leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. “Did you read any clues in the cards about what this Order operative wants?”
Faith pulled her hand from beneath mine. “What do they always want?”
Red simply looked at her.
Faith stared right back at him.
Across the room, the front door opened unexpectedly on its noisy hinges. Only one other person had a key to the apartment, not that she’d had to use it this time.
Red cocked his head at Faith. “You don’t lock the door behind you now?”
Faith’s eyes widened. Red’s tone hadn’t been angry. He’d been teasing her. Teasing. At a time like this. “Are you made of steel or something?”
Sunday Sloan did what Faith had forgotten to—flip the deadbolt home behind her—and stepped inside the small, stuffed entry. The music of her voice preceded her, like the sound water made as it flowed over rocks. “Never let him fool you, Faith. He’s made of feelings. Great big, mushy feelings.”
“That’s me,” Red said. “Pile of mush.”
Sunday shrugged out of her black trench coat, hanging it on top of mine. She peeled off a pair of gray wool gloves, tossing them on top of the keys. Thick blond curls brushed her shoulders. She wore the usual makeup on her porcelain face—just a pale pink flush of lipstick—along with a black T-shirt, black jeans, and steel-toe black boots with rubber soles. Practical.
Sunday had been my friend since I’d met her, and more beginning not long after the night of the survival test, when Miguel had drowned in the river. She’d been my lover. My soulmate. My salvation.
When I’d left the Order, I’d left her behind, too. She’d still believed in the Order. She was the best assassin they’d ever trained, and she had a thirst for killing. I wasn’t altogether sure that she’d lost that thirst.
That made me wary, even if I understood it. I’d been the same, once upon a time. I’d figured the Order had sent me after targets for a good reason, that they deserved what they got. Simple lies that masked the complex truth—that the Order contracted to kill good people as well as bad.
I tried not to think about my targets—my victims. Recriminations served no purpose. That left me with atonement. How to balance the scales? I had to believe it could be done.
“What’s the emergency?” Sunday asked.
I looked at Faith. “You called her?”
Faith flashed me her best dead-on duh expression. “All hands on deck.”
Red answered Sunday’s question. “Order operative on the way. Troublesome magic. Faith’s sleeping god thinks it’s a problem.”
She hesitated on her way to the table, so briefly that anyone who didn’t know her well probably wouldn’t have picked up on it. “ETA?”
He raised his cup to her. “God only knows.”
“Got any whisky to put in that coffee?” Sunday slipped past us, headed for the kitchen to grab another mug.
“Bourbon,” Red said. “Cabinet to the left of the sink, bottom shelf.”
Sunday returned with a mug, but no alcohol. She poured herself half of what remained in the press, offering the rest to me. When I shook my head, she topped off her portion.
“Changed your mind about the day drinking?” Red asked.
“You understand metaphors, right?” Sunday lifted her cup from the bottom and took a gulp rather than a sip.
“We’re screwed?” Red asked.
“Like a porn star,” Sunday said.
Faith’s jaw dropped, and I stared at Sunday.
“What?” Sunday took another swig of coffee. She glanced at Faith. “Did your god say anything specific?”
Faith closed her mouth. After a moment, she said, “Purple.”
“Purple what?” Sunday asked.
“That’s it,” Faith said. “Just the color.”
Sunday leaned back in her chair. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“What’s it sound like?” Red asked.
“Like a chameleon,” she said. “They’re the only magicians who have purple halos.”
I’d never met a chameleon. I’d only heard about them. Supposedly, their magic could camouflage them under any circumstances, like the creatures they’d been named after. They could also impersonate o
ther people, down to the visible pores on a nose, down to the way a person smelled and tasted. They were uncanny, and the Order only brought them out when need dictated.
Chameleons were great at observation. Infiltration. They were sent in when the target was so important and so dangerous, failure was not an option.
“I was trained in how to spot one, so I should be able to,” Sunday said. “Theoretically.”
I downed the contents of my cup. “Wait—what? Why’d the Order train you for that, but not me?”
“I was part of a pilot program,” she said. “The mentors were testing to see whether it was possible for someone who wasn’t a chameleon to spot one—particularly someone who couldn’t see magic the way you do, Night. Or you, Red. Soul-blind, they called it. They said it was because the chameleons would be needed on future missions, and the rest of us had to find a way to be able to work with them.”
“They said?” I asked.
“I got the impression they were lying,” Sunday said. “I got the impression they were afraid.”
I whistled. If something—someone—had made the higher-ups at the Order nervous enough to show, we should be afraid, too.
“The first and only clue is the halo,” she said. “It’s purple, and it’s not fixed. Also, their souls remain their own at the deepest level. That was what I was told. For the soul-blind, there’s a shimmer that you can sometimes catch from the corner of your eye when the chameleon moves.”
Red set down his cup. “That’s it?”
Sunday nodded.
“Damn,” he said.
I sat back. “How successful were you, spotting chameleons for the Order?”
“One out of twenty,” she said.
Bad odds. “You get a sense of how many chameleons there are?”
She met my gaze. “They didn’t tell me, but if I were guessing, I’d put the number at about a hundred.”
“How could there be that many?” Red asked. “I mean, are there a shit ton of assassins who can blind their enemies with a single glance?”
“Just me,” Sunday said. “Just like there’s only one Night.”
“Illustrates my point.”
She sighed. “There’s a thing that happens—a phenomenon, the mentors would call it—where when there’s need in the world for a certain type of magic, it appears. More children who carry that kind of power are born to answer the need. According to the mentor I asked, that started happening with chameleons about twenty, thirty years ago. That’s what I know.”
“That’s all?” Red asked.
“Unfortunately, yes.” She looked at Red. “You need to take a look at all of us now, and you can start with me. Don’t just look at the way my soul manifests. Don’t just check my thoughts and feelings. Look deeper.”
“This is practice?” he asked.
“You can think of it that way, sure,” she said.
“And we need a baseline check to make sure that everyone in this room is who they say they are,” he said.
She nodded.
“You’re you,” he said.
Faith blinked. “That fast? You already checked her?”
He nodded. It was what he did.
Faith pushed away from the table, rising to pace the length of the room, table to fireplace and back again. The rhythm of her steps grated. The tension in her body seemed too much for one girl to hold.
Sunday narrowed her eyes. “Anxious?”
“Aren’t you?” Faith asked.
Sunday turned away without answering. “Night, you’ll have to check Red. Can you do that?”
I nodded, then took a deep breath and focused my power on Red—on his grass and earth halo, the way it played on the edges of his skin. The warmth that radiated from him.
I slipped into his mind. My magic melded with his thoughts and emotions as if they were my own.
He trained his whole self—his perceptions and sensations—on me. I saw my face the way he did, through his eyes, noting the fall of my hair along the curve of my neck, the particular shade of brown that suffused my skin, the bow of my mouth. Pressure filled his chest—an overflow of feeling. Some of it was fear for what might happen. Most of it was love.
The depth of the emotion surprised me. I tried not to let that show.
I turned to his memories, rifling through them in search of the one I wanted, filled with darkness, and only a sliver of light creeping in through the crack between the double doors. The light flashed red and blue, red and blue. It came from the trucks outside on the street.
The hardwood floor of the closet hit every pressure point on Red’s body. He couldn’t lie still, which meant he couldn’t sleep. Hell, he was a pure fool, as his mom would say, for even trying. The house next door had burned near to the ground. The fire department’s best and brightest had done what they could to save it and the folks inside, but they’d been too late.
The lone survivor of the fire was a secret, and she was in his closet, out like a light and having dreams filled with terror, judging by the way she shook. She reeked of smoke and singed hair and other things he didn’t want to imagine but couldn’t help—melting plastic and Sheetrock and furniture and…well…people.
She’d wrapped both arms around his yellow Lab, Dorothy, so tight it was a wonder that Dorothy hadn’t squirmed away or bitten her, but the dog seemed to know what she needed and had refused to leave her side.
Neither would Red. He’d hide her as long as he needed to.
He mentally ticked through all the stuff he was supposed to do tomorrow. Things he would have to put off. Ride his bike to the library. Catch a game of football with Doug Martin from two blocks over. Work on the book report for his English class on Monday. He was only halfway finished reading Watership Down.
I whispered to his little boy self. What did you say to me when you found me tonight? What did you say, exactly?
Nothing, the little boy whispered.
He’d grabbed me around the waist as I sneaked through his backyard, tucking a hand over my mouth as tight as he could without hurting me so that I wouldn’t cry out.
What was my name? I asked.
Rosa, he said. The most beautiful name in the world.
Outside the closet, the world was on fire.
A sound so faint I shouldn’t have been able to hear it from inside Red’s memory raised my hackles. Animal instinct took over.
I let go of Red so fast, my magic rebounded like the business end of a slingshot—rocking me in my chair at the dinette. My vision blurred, my breath ragged. My hand twitched, knocking over my cup.
Instinct took over—I pivoted in my seat and ducked a half second later without knowing why.
It saved my life.
Chapter 2
THE BLADE ARCED over the top of my head, whisking through the strands of my hair and burying itself to the hilt in the Sheetrock.
For a moment, time slowed. Dust motes floated past my face. Shock threatened to numb me from the inside out as I stared at the one who’d thrown the knife. My daughter.
Faith met my gaze, her eyes filled with the kind of calculation that I’d only ever seen in another operative.
She’d never looked at me like that. She didn’t know how.
Time sped up again. Everything happened too fast.
Red slipped from his seat, sliding beneath the table and out of the line of fire.
Sunday stood and flipped her chair in one fluid motion, launching it across the room at Faith with a precision she couldn’t dodge. The full weight of the chair, with Sunday’s muscle behind it, struck Faith in the center of the face as she dropped low behind the shield of the coffee table.
No way this could be my kid. No way had she learned to take body blow like that—or to move like that.
I mapped Faith’s next moves as if she were a full-grown, full-fledged operative: Throw the table. Rush us. Avoid Sunday’s line of sight at all costs. If Sunday could see her, Sunday could blind her.
Unlike Sunday, I didn’t ne
ed a line of sight in order to take her. I needed only proximity and time. I reached for Faith’s mind—and closed my mental fingers around nothing, as if I were trying to catch smoke with my bare hands. I sucked in a breath.
Faith’s mind was slippery. Each entry point—a stray thought I could latch onto, a strategic ebb or flow, a focus on one or the other of us—slid out from under my magical grasp.
I flashed a glance at Sunday. She saw I didn’t have control. She launched herself at Faith like a missile.
Faith picked up the table and charged.
Sunday hit the tabletop before Faith could get enough traction to push back. Faith backpedaled into the fireplace with a thud that shook the painting of Our Lady, frame rattling against the wall.
I grabbed for Faith’s mind again, slip-sliding against her thoughts.
Sunday bounced back, dropped low, and swept Faith’s legs.
Faith and the table went over like a felled tree. The table legs she’d white-knuckled snapped with the impact. Her forehead smacked into the underside of the teak.
I caught a single, stray memory at the edges of Faith’s mind. One that she hadn’t guarded as tightly as the others. One that I could wrap my magical fingers around.
She felt my reach. She fought against it, winding the memory this way and that, stealing it from my grasp. Once. Twice.
The third time was the charm.
I melded my magic with the rhythm of her winding. I slipped into the memory as if it were my own, struggling to gain purchase as if I were trying to grab hold of moss-covered rocks with my bare feet.
I became her.
I bobbed in a river, water raging all around me. The sky was dark, clouds dimming the light of the stars, a sign that God had left me in the cold and dark. I tried to swim. I couldn’t make my arms work right. The spray off the surface blinded me. Rain fell in sheets. The wind gusted, wild and terrifying. My mouth filled with water. It tasted like death. I swallowed it and managed a mouthful of precious air before I sank below the rough surface.
I couldn’t navigate the raging water. I couldn’t push my way to the surface—which way was up? The icy cold of the river seeped through my skin, dragging my muscles, chilling me all the way to the depths of my bones.
Night Rises: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 2) Page 2
