That explained what I’d seen on my way in. “The walk is scorched.”
Faith pressed her head into Red’s back, planting it between his shoulder blades. “He was trying to open a door to another place,” she said. “A magical door. If he could open it and walk through, maybe he would live. He didn’t make it.”
A door to the In-Between, judging by the scent I’d caught.
“This is crazy,” she said.
Red reached for Faith’s hand and wrapped it in his own. “You did good.”
“How could that possibly be good?” she asked.
“Saved my life,” he said. “Saved your own. That’s good in my book.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Faith, why won’t you let me see you?”
She pulled her hand from Red’s. “What if I hurt you?”
The words felt like a knife to my heart. That she would ever worry about something like that. “That’ll never happen,” I said.
She raised her head and cocked it to the side, peeking out from behind Red enough that I could see her eyes. Her brown eyes, which weren’t brown anymore. They shone gold, with the same color fire that had killed the operative.
“How can you be sure?” she asked.
Looking at the power in those eyes, I couldn’t be. Looking at her face, knowing what was in her heart, I had no doubt. “I know you.”
She placed a hand on Red’s arm, leaning around him a little more. He stepped to the side.
The silver shimmer of her halo was flecked with gold. Not a lot of it, but enough to tell me that something significant had changed with her magic. This morning’s revelation aside, what had happened had to have been sudden.
She wore a long, bright purple sweater with a black T-shirt underneath, black leggings, and black riding boots. She’d painted her nails black. Her hands trembled.
The fact that she wasn’t curled up on the ground in shock surprised me. I felt grateful as hell for her resilience, for whatever powers had her back, and for Red and the way he watched over her.
I held out my arms. Faith rushed into them.
I drew her close and held her tight, breathing in the scent of her. She still felt the same, albeit more cracked open and easy to read than any sixteen-year-old wanted to be.
She spoke low in my ear. “What the hell is happening, Night?”
I wished I had an answer. I kissed the top of Faith’s head. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”
She pulled away from me a little. “We.”
The gold had faded from her pupils, leaving only a gilded rim around the edges. Her eyes, but not her eyes. I recognized the determination in them, however. I’d hadn’t been able to keep her out of the heart of things last time we’d had a situation. She’d ended up in deep. Trying to hold her back again was likely to have the same result—or worse.
“We,” I said.
Red sighed. “I need to get cleaned up. We need to close up shop for the next few days and head over to the Watcher’s house.”
I nodded at him, then looked at Faith. “You want to splash some cold water on your face?”
“For real,” she said, and stepped around me to make her way back inside.
Red and I watched each other, waiting for the click of the bathroom door closing before either of us said a word.
When the sound finally came, he spoke first. “Jesus.”
I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, then brushed the hair away from my face.
“She knew before I did,” he said. “Before you’d even finished telling me to get us out of here, Night.”
“She knew, or the god inside her?” I asked.
He considered the question, his brows traveling all the way to his hairline and back again. “The lines are blurred.”
Faith’s magic allowed her to talk with gods, to hear what they said to her. Did she have a way to know which thoughts and feelings belonged strictly to her, and which came from the gods? Or, in this case, the Awakened?
Faith had been in the dark for so long about who I’d been and how she’d come to live with me. We’d been on the run from the Order all of that time. Because using her magic would have drawn unwanted attention, I’d never taught her how to use it properly. No guidelines, no if-this-then-that. Whatever she’d learned had been through trial and error. The problem was that with magic, error could have extreme consequences.
We’d just begun working on the basics, like the divination she and her friends had done last night. The one that had brought us what little warning we’d had this time.
“She needs more training,” I said.
He set his hands on his hips. “Yeah, she does.”
“It should be a priority.”
“Sure. What we can teach her in the thirty days—or thirty minutes—between mortal threats.”
That was what it had come to. I sighed. An unfamiliar feeling crept in, taking shallow root in the bowl of my belly. It took me a moment to name it.
Helplessness.
Something I hadn’t felt since I’d been a child, back when Red had been the boy next door and I’d been at the mercy of people more concerned with whether my magic had come from the Devil than the fact that I’d been a confused, scared little girl who only needed love and patience.
I’d learned long since how to take control. How to be the decision maker. How to pivot on a dime when circumstances thwarted my plans. I knew from contingencies, and perseverance, and craft and skill.
I no longer knew how to be helpless.
I felt Red’s eyes on me, studying me. I met his gaze.
The corners of his mouth turned down. “Night, I thought that was it. When that chameleon came at me, I thought he’d go straight through me to Faith. I thought—”
I stepped into him. He pulled me close. I let his body and his halo envelop me. The grass and earth grounded me in the here and now. It gave me strength I didn’t know I needed. I did my best to give that strength to him as well.
“It wasn’t the end,” I said. “It won’t be.”
He glanced down at me, lifting my chin so that he could see my face, and I could see his. “You can’t make that promise, but you can do something for me.”
I waited.
“Faith’s not the only one who needs training.”
“Your magic is solid,” I said.
“My magic isn’t tactical,” he said. “It’s information gathering. I’m good with it, yeah. And I’m strong enough physically. But I’ve never had to learn how to fight the way you and Sunday do. I’ve never wanted to, honestly. But I think I need that now.”
I couldn’t argue with his logic. In fact, I should’ve beaten him to the punch with it. I should’ve insisted he get started during the month of relative peace we’d had. I hadn’t done that because he’d been coming to terms with my past, and what we had between us was so new. He’d had to figure out for himself whether he could deal with me as I was, and whether he wanted to stick around to help with the trouble on the way.
I drew in a shaky breath. If Red had gone all-in, then he’d weighed the terrible things I’d done and the current and future danger against possibility, and possibility had won out. That meant everything in the world to me. But in for the possibility meant in for the blood and tears, too—the blood on his face and in his hair. The tears that he hadn’t let fall, but that I could feel hovering just below the surface.
“All right,” I said.
He nodded. “Let’s get this place locked up.”
I motioned with my head for him to head inside first. After he’d gone, I plucked the phone from my back pocket. I had a text—not from Sunday, asking for a report. From Addie, our local Watcher.
Need you.
That was all.
Watchers shouldn’t need their sworn enemies, even those with whom they’d sworn a truce. Watchers supposedly descended from the time before Noah and his ark and the big, Biblical flood—supposedly descended from the mating of humans with the fal
len angels called Nephilim.
They kept tabs on people who carried magic, chronicling their activities and monitoring threats. If a threat became imminent, they worked with local magical law enforcement to eliminate the problem. On rare occasions, they even contracted with the Order to hit those magic users they believed too dangerous to be allowed to come into their power.
Our local Watchers consisted of two people. Jess, who was a friend of Faith’s and a Watcher-in-training, and her aunt, Addie, who was in her late fifties and had been around the block a time or two. Addie had entered a rare contract with the Order, once upon a time. The person she considered too dangerous to come into their power had been me.
Addie had put out the original hit on me, the one during which an Order operative had tried to kill me and taken out my parents instead. I hadn’t forgiven her, and I sure as hell hadn’t forgotten. Our relationship was complicated. We’d kept the uneasy truce between us for the last month, since the Angel had come to town.
If Addie needed me—that could not be good. I frowned.
Red had gone to grab a change of clothes from his locker and take a quick shower. A wise choice, given how bloodied and banged up he was. And Faith had retreated to the office, playing games on her phone as if she hadn’t fought a life-or-death battle half an hour ago. I could see her from where I stood through the small window. It helped me breathe easier.
I texted Addie back. On our way in 20. Then I dialed Sunday’s number.
She picked up on the first ring.
“Well?” she said.
“Red’s a little banged up.”
“Faith?”
I laid out the details for her.
“That’s a feature, Night. Not a bug.”
“For whom?” I asked.
She sighed. She didn’t say any of the things she could have, like how having a god on our side was a good thing. She was thinking it, though. I didn’t have to magic my way into her mind to know that.
“What’s up with our prisoner?” I asked.
“Worse for wear. He’s out and ready for transport.”
“Where’s he going?”
“Addie’s,” she said. “The old lady called me. Said she wanted us over there and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Said she had containment for Miguel—me, too, if I didn’t behave myself. You know how she hates me.”
“Not any more than she hates me,” I said. “She summoned me, too.”
“Shit,” she said. “Which do you think it’s about—Miguel or Faith?”
“Both,” I said. But trouble usually came in threes. I didn’t want to ask about a third problem. I didn’t want to double dare the Universe to give us one.
“Miguel tell you anything new?” I asked.
A hint of frustration colored her voice. “Not a damn word.”
Not surprising. “Addie’s?”
“Yep,” she said. “See you there.”
I tucked the phone back into my pocket, focusing on the weight of my feet on the concrete. It felt normal, like my own experience of gravity. The smell of sulfur lingered just a bit, but it, too, was on its way out.
I turned over the idea—and the feeling—of helplessness in my mind. When I’d been with the Order, I’d had one thing to face and one thing only: do my job. The consequences of failure were severe, and final. After Faith and I had gone on the run, I’d had her to care for, to worry about, to protect. She’d been my only focus. My only reason.
Red was something else.
I’d been wrong to think of what we’d been doing together as lighthearted. Whatever it was, we weren’t playing.
I didn’t know how to feel about that.
The breeze lifted my hair off my shoulders, sliding across my skin like cool water. The afternoon had traveled on a bit, enough for evening to shoulder its way in. The temperature had dropped a couple of degrees since I’d arrived. The forecast called for a cold, clear night, and maybe some snow in a couple of days.
Very bad timing. Portland and snow didn’t mix all that well.
I walked back into the gym, moving from the hard concrete of the dock onto the soft spring of the mats, keeping eyes on the outside, the unknown. I reached overhead to grab hold of the handle at the bottom of the garage door and wrapped my fingers around it, hanging there for a good minute. I gave the back lot with its waving weeds and pockmarked asphalt and the street beyond a last, lingering look. Everything seemed fine to both my eyes and my magical senses. Even so, I felt another prickling at the nape of my neck, hackles threatening to rise.
The information wasn’t entirely useless. I’d remain on alert at an instinctual level if nothing else. That would make it harder for someone to get the drop on me—on us. But that was all it was for now. I couldn’t fight what I couldn’t sense.
Just like I couldn’t fight the meltdown that would come for Faith before too long. She was safe, for now. She’d survived the chameleon attack. She’d saved Red’s life. She’d also killed a man.
I’d known what that was like at her age, but I’d had one hundred percent of the innocence trained out of me by then, and I’d been taught to kill. Doing what I’d been honed to do had literally destroyed my soul. The one I had left, well, it had been built of the remnants of the souls of people I’d assassinated. I didn’t know how. I only knew that I didn’t deserve it.
Faith wasn’t like me. She still held onto some innocence and gentleness. She’d handled finding out about my past with a remarkable amount of grace, but it didn’t rest easy with her. How would she feel after the shock wore off?
I took a deep breath and pulled down the door on the exhale. The door flowed easy on its tracks, its bottom edge hitting with a metal-on-concrete ring that reverberated against the gym’s walls and in the depths of my bones.
After the sound faded, I had exactly thirty seconds of peace and calm. Then someone banged on the front door.
Unlikely that anyone with bad intent would’ve taken the time to knock, but it wasn’t unheard of.
I called out to Faith. “Stay put! I got this!”
She didn’t listen, even after everything that had happened. In fact, she raced out of Red’s office and up the stairs so fast, it was a miracle she didn’t trip over her own feet. I ran after her, knowing that if whoever had knocked meant her harm, I’d be too late to stop it.
I heard the door open. The electronic bell chimed. I bounded the stairs in time to see who’d come.
Just one person, and not anyone dangerous to me or mine. He looked at home in the gym because he came here all the time, especially to my 6:00 a.m. weekday classes. He sometimes left his sweaty socks behind in the cubbies. He liked to sit on the man-eating sofa and read on his phone.
Ben Patterson, one of Faith’s group of magical friends. He was her age, but he’d already developed a nice set of worry lines across his forehead that made him seem older. He had an unusually deep voice and wary brown eyes that helped with that impression.
I could only see one of his eyes. His long, brown hair and even longer bangs hid the other. He had a thin nose, a meticulously groomed soul patch, and a halo that might as well have been a gray stone wall.
He was a shield. As in, his magic formed a shield against all other magic.
No magic I’d seen so far had been able to penetrate his protections. He could shield himself completely, and he could shield one or two others if they stood beside him. He’d worked hard on that in the last month. His life, and the lives of people he cared about, depended on it.
Today, he’d dressed the same color as his halo. Everything gray, from his boots and jeans to his sweater and hooded coat beaded with rain.
Faith had locked the door behind him. He’d wrapped a hand around her arm, the other hand reaching to open the door. He wanted to leave. Faith wanted to stay.
“Hey,” I said.
Ben let go of Faith and turned slowly on his heel. With a toss of his head, he cleared the bangs from his eyes. He met my gaze and waved. “Hey, Night.�
�
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“It’s not what it looks like,” he said.
Not the first time I’d heard that from him. “What does it look like?”
“Like I was trying to take Faith out of here. I mean, why would I do that?”
“I’d love to know,” I said. “Let’s start at the beginning: what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be with the others at Addie’s, waiting for us.”
“You’re late,” he said.
I folded my arms across my chest. “Obvious. Pick another choice.”
He bit his bottom lip. “There’s a problem.”
“Addie texted about that.”
“This would be a different problem. One she doesn’t know about it,” he said. “Yet.”
“We’re all full up on problems right now,” I said. “Starting with the fact that I need to look at you. With my magic.”
“Right,” he said. “Red checked earlier.”
“That was then,” I said.
His eyes widened. “It feels wrong. No, that’s not the right word. It hurts.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t necessary.”
He took a deep breath and slowly opened a rift in his gray halo. It came apart the way two magnets would—with a lot of effort and strain. I slipped in through the open space and slid into his memory, looking for a piece of Ben that no one else could know. I found it in the memory of a starry July 4th night with his dad on the Oregon coast.
He gasped.
His father had been around more then. They’d walked on the beach that night and talked about important things, and—I withdrew before I dove too deeply. I had what I needed.
He leaned against the door for support as his halo closed again. “Could you not do that again?”
“No promises.”
“That’s too bad.” He studied his boots.
“It is,” I said. “So, what are you doing here?”
He glanced up at me, his lips pressed into a thin line.
Night Rises: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 2) Page 6
