by Anton Strout
• • •
Caleb refused to talk to me until he had me back at the Gramercy Belarus Building and had helped settle the stone wings I had been constructing on my shoulders.
“I still don’t see how going to the bar is supposed to help with all this,” I said, adjusting my balance so I wouldn’t fall over from their weight. “What’s that got to do with my learning to fly?”
“Tonight was bigger than just flying, Alexandra,” he said. “It’s about why you’ve been having trouble with the higher abilities you’ve been toying with as a Spellmason.”
As he led me across the broken library out onto the terrace, I asked, “How so?”
“I’ve been asking some questions here and there,” he said, ducking my wings through the hole where the French doors used to hang. “There’s one thing most of the practitioners back in Eccentric Circles have in common. All of them possess an ability to split their mind, which I don’t think is something I’ve seen mentioned in what you’ve shown me on Spellmasonry.”
“And that’s helpful how?”
“You spend your time trying to bring stone to life with your main focus,” he said, pulling out a vial of Kimiya and rubbing it along the top edge of the wings, “but I think your arcane discipline demands you hold focus on several things at once. You have to be able to split that focus several different ways. It’s not enough just to control stone; you also have to be able to finesse it in other ways. Bringing you someplace with a lot to concentrate on hopefully loosened you up to that a bit. At the very least, it should have helped you a bit with focusing your back mind on counting. Which is what I want to test now.” He checked the inside lining of his coat. “I’m really starting to run low on the Kimiya. And my reverse engineering it is still likely to blow us both up, so that’s still an issue, but right now we need to do two things: First, you need to practice with these wings.”
“How?”
“By flying,” he said.
I laughed, nerves behind it all. “Are you serious? Now?”
“No time like the present,” he said with a smile.
“And what will you be doing?” I asked.
“Watching you,” he said, “and also thinking about the second part of my plan for your flight. I have to come up with the best way to capture Stanis.”
My stomach sank, knotting up. “So I’m . . . what? Bait?”
“That’s such an ugly word,” he said, pulling out his notebook and beginning to scribble in it. “I prefer to think of you as . . . motivational material.”
No matter what Caleb called it, I still felt like a worm ready to be put on the end of the line. Still, I hated to be defeatist. Maybe I could keep myself in the air. Sure, failure was an option, but so was success.
I stood there, the wings feeling all the heavier now that we had moved out into the wind on the terrace. “So what do I do?”
“I want you to concentrate on bringing the stone to life, then using that rhythmic count, keeping it in time and using the tempo to lift yourself off the terrace.”
I gave a grim smile. “You make it sound so simple,” I said. “Dying is simple, too.”
“Just go up a few feet and hold your position,” he said. “We just need a proof of concept, not breaking the sound barrier or anything.”
“Right,” I said, and pushed images of my falling out of the night sky from my mind. I pressed my power out into the wings, grinding them to life as my connect set in. With the memory of Rory’s Swan Lake audition piece in mind from our youth, I forced the wings into a quick and fluid pattern. Ignoring the press of their physical weight against my body, I pressed them harder and harder as I quickened my count. When my feet left the stone of the terrace, I pushed the count to the back of my mind, rising several feet into the air.
“I’m doing it,” I said, unable to suppress a giddy laugh. “I’m actually doing it.”
“Okay,” Caleb said, looking up from his notes. “Now tell me about the people back at the bar.”
I wavered in the air as my wings fell out of rhythm. “What? I’m flying!”
“Just do it!” he shouted with such force, I almost lost my rhythm again and banked closer to the edge of the terrace, veering toward the alley but pulling myself back up in time.
“You don’t have to be so mean,” I muttered.
“I’m not,” he said, lowering his notebook but not really softening, “but if you can’t do two things at once, or deal with a little surprise, then you might as well let Stanis tear you apart right now because that’s what he’ll do.”
“I’m not going to have to outfly him, am I?” I said, counting. Always counting. “He’s got centuries of practice.”
“And you’ve got now,” he said. “So I suggest you work at it. And no, you won’t have to outfly him. At least, not for too long, anyway.”
“Because you’re going to capture him,” I said. “How?”
Caleb held up his notebook, waving it at me. “I’m working on it,” he said. “But by rough calculations, we may exhaust what remains of both our Kimiya supplies. Unless you want to try my home brew again, but that still has a 70 percent chance of blowing us up.”
All of the remaining Kimiya? “What do you have planned?” I asked.
“You work on your part, and I’ll work on mine,” he said. “Now, tell me about the people you saw at the bar.”
I thought back on earlier that evening, this time my wings staying at a constant rate, holding me in place about ten feet over the terrace. Now I needed to work on splitting my mind to recall the people in the crowd, not to mention that it was already splitting away wondering how we were going to deal with the Kimiya shortage . . . My wings wavered but I refocused my efforts, hoping this would help when it came to flying against Stanis once Caleb’s plan was ready.
“The warlock with the Green Man tattoo,” I started, holding my position in the air, “the guy with the retractable bat sticking out of his leather coat . . .”
Sixteen
Alexandra
The next morning, my knees were sore from landing hard on the stone terrace during our flight testing, so I slept in before hobbling downtown to the Libra Concordia in the old, abandoned church across from Trinity Church in the hopes of finding more information on either Kimiya production or this splitting of the mind Caleb was so keen on talking about.
Pleased with the angel-specific distractions I fed him, Desmond Locke had made good on his promise and granted Marshall and Rory access to the research room at the Libra Concordia. My friends’ help in sorting through the books made the going much quicker, even despite their constant questioning. If there was information on how to master the production of Kimiya in what the Libra Concordia had on hand in their archives, we would find it. That was, if I could concentrate, what with Desmond Locke poking his head into the research room every half hour or so.
“You can’t dodge him forever,” Rory said, organizing her books where she sat across from me, with Marshall off to her left.
“I don’t need to,” I said, scribbling in my notebook. “I just need to stay on his good side until we can find what I’m looking for.”
“Eventually, he’ll want to know about Stanis,” Marshall said in a low whisper, his eyes on the door, “and what will you tell him?”
“I’m not going to tell him anything,” I said. “He doesn’t need to know about my family’s secret legacy beyond whatever he’s gleaned through his association with the Libra Concordia. And he certainly doesn’t need to know what Stanis has been up to, gathering all those statues on top of the Belarus Building.”
“It’s creepy,” Rory said. “It’s like he’s developing hoarder tendencies.”
“I don’t know what the purpose of it all is,” I said. “But my best guess is he’s amassing an army for Kejetan and his men. He’s actually done us a favor, though.”
“He has?” Marshall asked.
I nodded.
“Caleb and I have made progress on reverse eng
ineering the formula,” I said. “But it would help us perfect what we need if we can find my great-great-grandfather’s ‘recipe’ spell book for it. I was working to build a statue to test it on, but now we’ve got plenty of Belarus-made test subjects gathered in one place.”
Rory yawned. “I miss sleep,” she said. “Dance classes by day, research and gargoyle experimentation by night.”
“So much regular-world stuff to do during the day, fighting evil at night,” Marshall said. “I don’t know how Batman does it.”
I took the conversation’s turning to comics as my cue to get back to work and fell silent, thankful when Rory and Marshall did the same.
Looking through the histories of the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds for clues to my great-great-grandfather’s work was a slow and laborious chore, but if there was anything to be found outside of my family’s library on the man, the Libra Concordia was the most likely of places for it.
“You’re doing it again,” Rory said, smacking me with one of the books from her side of the table.
“I am?” I asked. “Counting?”
“Yes!” Marshall confirmed it by hitting me with his own book.
“But I wasn’t doing it out loud this time,” I protested.
Rory pointed to the pen I had poised over my notebook. “You were tapping it out.”
“Shit,” I said, angry with myself more than anything. If I couldn’t keep the count at the back of my mind without indicating it externally, I still wasn’t doing it right.
“Can you at least tell us why you need to be counting all the time?” Marshall asked. “Does it have a higher purpose than just bothering us?”
“It’s just this thing I’ve been working on with Caleb,” I said, noticing the annoyed look on both their faces at my mentioning the alchemist’s name.
“Counting,” Rory said. “You and blondie are working on counting. Like in music?”
“Yes.” I sighed.
“Are you starting a band?” Rory asked.
I considered just answering yes to that as well. It would be easier than explaining the whole of the events from the other night in the art studio.
“No,” I said.
“Oh!” Marshall exclaimed in full-blown mockery. “Does it involve trying to destroy the rest of my store . . . ?”
“I paid for your damaged table,” I reminded him. “And your little teeny town dungeon. Besides, Caleb and I both apologized for that. You should give the guy a chance. He’s trying to help me.”
The gap between us across the table couldn’t have felt wider or more awkward than it did just then. I couldn’t help but think it might be in part because they were sensing that I was leaving some things out of my story.
But why was I doing it? To protect them?
No. The truth was I wasn’t sure how I felt about what was happening between Caleb and me. I didn’t want to put my trust issues out there when I needed to get everyone on board with the idea of his working with us. Despite the potential embarrassment, I decided to woman up and put on my big-girl panties.
“You should give him a chance,” I repeated, my voice lowering as I met their eyes, “because I’m giving him a chance. I kind of like the guy.”
Rory laughed, then cocked her head at me when she saw I was serious. “Does he buy you flowers?” she asked, only half mocking now. “Or does he bippity boppity boo some mice and turn them into flowers for you?”
“We’re not dating,” I said, not liking the attitude I was getting after laying part of my feelings out there. “I don’t know what to call it, so give it a rest.”
“Fine,” Rory said, leaning back in her chair, defeated.
Small victory though it was, I felt mighty triumphant about it. Still, why miss out on the opportunity to kick our conversation up a notch?
“Although,” I said, drawing the word out, “we might have snogged for a bit over at the Belarus Building the other night.”
Rory shot forward again, grabbing me across the table. “Shut up!”
Marshall sighed, leaning his head down into his hands. “Could you two maybe make all this a little less Twilight?”
“Jealous?” I asked.
Marshall hesitated, then looked up, cradling his face in his hands. “Maybe . . . ?” he said.
Rory and I fell back into our chairs, genuine laughter rising from both of us, refreshing after months and months of tension and failed experiments.
Marshall shook his head at the two of us. “How is it you get to make out with someone—a bit of a dick, by the way—and I can’t even get a woman to hand me her real phone number?”
Rory shrugged. “Probably because you’re busy throwing Magic: The Gathering tournaments . . . ?”
“Not now, Ror,” he said, eyeing her with daggers. He turned to me. “I’m going to take this as a sign that you’re definitely spending too much time with this alchemist.”
“Take what as a sign?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The tongue bathing you probably gave each other . . . ?”
“That’s a pretty picture,” I said.
“Almost as pretty as ‘snogging,’” he said.
I couldn’t argue.
“Well, that settles that,” Rory said. “I mean, if a guy puts his tongue in you, he’s totally trustworthy. Except, oh no, wait . . . He’s a guy.”
“I didn’t say I trusted him,” I said. “I only said I made out with him, which implies there’s some sort of connection. Hopefully, that grows into trust, but I’m not stupid.”
My instinct told me not to tell them anything about his freelance work with Kejetan. Eventually, I needed all three of them on my side working together, and to coin Caleb’s phrase, I had to take baby steps toward building that foundation. Admitting intimacy between the two of us would get them to accept Caleb more readily while allowing me to use it in trying to figure out where his true loyalties lay. I only hoped I had given my friends enough information to get them not to make stink faces when I mentioned his name.
“Well?” I asked, looking for a reaction.
Marshall shrugged, having already voiced his discomfort over all this girl talk.
“Hope you know what you’re doing,” Rory said, falling back into the book in front of her.
This time I fell back to my own research, my mind freer than before thanks to my confession. It also seemed to do the trick in helping with my back mind counting because I went a half hour more with it without interruption until my phone vibrated on the table.
Caleb.
“Be right back,” I said, standing, as Rory and Marshall looked up at me.
I snatched my phone off the table and ran to the door, throwing it open.
Outside the research room, the transformed church still held the air of authority, and I couldn’t help but lower my voice to a whisper as I answered.
“Yeah?”
“You ready? Time to fly. For real.”
“What?” I asked, looking around to make sure Desmond Locke wasn’t anywhere close enough to hear. “Now?”
“There’s no time like the present. Is that a problem?”
“No,” I said, trying to hide my hesitation. “I just didn’t expect to do this already. Are you ready on your end?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m broke from buying supplies, and I may have depleted much of your stash of Kimiya in the process, but I’m ready. Have you been practicing your counting?”
“Yes,” I said, neglecting to leave out the part where I kept forgetting to keep it at the back of my mind.
“Then we shouldn’t have an issue,” he said. “Can we meet in, say, an hour?”
“Fine,” I said. “Anything I should bring?”
“Just your Spellmasony little self,” he said, and hung up.
I slid my phone into the back pocket of my jeans and hurried back to the room to gather my belongings into my backpack. Alexander’s stone tome was still in it, and I slid my notebook in as I sorted
through the books on top of the table.
“Gotta run,” I said, trying to sound calm, but neither of them looked all too convinced.
“Everything all right?” Rory asked.
“Fine,” I said, struggling with a quick response. “Just an . . . alchemy thing.” I could endure the ridicule of confessing what Caleb and I had done the other night, but I didn’t dare divulge the next part of our plan to them. Honesty was one thing, and sharing my intimate moment harmless in the grand scheme of things, but keeping this next part of the plan from them meant Rory and Marshall would be safe if it blew up in our faces.
I slid two of the more promising books I had pulled across the table to Rory. “Keep at it,” I said. “We need to find Alexander’s book.”
Marshall grabbed one of them but eyed me with skepticism. “Sure this isn’t a booty call?” he asked.
“No, it’s not,” I said, heading for the door leading out of the research room. “And please don’t ever say booty call again. It doesn’t work for you.”
“Let me know how the alchemy of French kissing goes for you,” Marshall called out after me.
I shot him a look that shut him down.
“Don’t you stay out too late, young lady,” Rory chided, as I opened the door leading out of the room.
I was already regretting being honest about that part of the other night. My only hope was that after tonight’s plan, I still got to continue living to regret it.
Seventeen
Alexandra
Nerves were a wonderful thing. They kept you on your toes, made you feel alive, especially when there was always a good chance of dying in the risky world of Spellmasonry. At least tonight there were some good nerves filling my mind, and seeing Caleb reading through one of Alexander’s books while waiting in my family’s art studio filled me with an irresistible urge to kiss him. So I did.
For a second, he hesitated in surprise, but there was a hungry desperation in both of us that took over. All thoughts drifted from my mind for a moment, a welcome relief to everything going on, and I only broke away from Caleb when I realized I was still counting in the back of my head.
