The Fever King

by Lee, Victoria

  When they got back to the barracks, it was to find the others still awake and crowded into the common room, bowls of popcorn perched on their knees.

  “Hey, you’re back just in time,” Taye said. “Look what we’re watching.” He gestured toward the television and grinned.

  “What am I supposed to be looking at here?” Dara said as Noam dropped into the armchair nearest Ames, who flicked a popcorn kernel at his ear.

  “It’s the new Lehrer biopic. Released just in time for Remembrance Day.”

  Dara’s expression darkened so immediately it was as if a curtain had pulled shut behind his eyes. “Let’s not.”

  “Too bad, overruled by democratic process.” Taye swung his leg where it was hooked over the arm of the sofa, clearly trying to kick Dara in the thigh, but missed. “Besides. You just don’t wanna watch ’cause he’s your daddy.”

  Dara looked like he wanted to be physically ill. “Don’t say that.”

  “What, don’t say the truth?”

  “We aren’t related.”

  “Yeah, okay, doesn’t make him not your dad. I wish Lehrer was my dad.”

  Ames snorted. “C’mon, Taye, we’ve all met your dad. Your dad’s awesome.” She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her back pocket and tapped them against the end table. “Howard’s not here—y’all mind if I smoke?”

  “Go for it,” Dara muttered, and he spun on his heel, disappearing down the dim hall toward the bedrooms.

  He didn’t emerge again, not even when Taye paused the movie to pass around obligatory it’s-a-national-holiday shots, even though Dara never missed an opportunity to get drunk. Noam was halfway to wasted already, and the shots just made it worse.

  Probably inappropriate, all of them trashed on shitty tequila—except Bethany, whom Ames had developed some bizarre sense of protectiveness toward; the older girl snatched every shot passed Bethany’s way right out of her hand. For her own part, Bethany just kept giggling about the biceps of the actor playing Lehrer, drunk enough on cherry soda. A part of Noam felt guilty. It was Remembrance Day. They ought to, like, watch the memorial ceremony, or something, where the real Lehrer was speaking on the loss of his brother and everyone murdered during the catastrophe.

  Instead he ended up sprawled on the couch, with his head in Bethany’s lap and his legs in Taye’s, Ames in the chair by the window, where she could blow her smoke into the night air.

  The movie was actually good. Noam had read the book, of course—it’d been one of his first self-prescribed assignments after he started Level IV. Lehrer had been Noam’s age when he was liberated from the hospital, but even at sixteen he’d been more legend than teenage boy.

  Lehrer’s brother died when Lehrer was nineteen, and Lehrer was crowned king less than a year later. Then he’d spent years fighting off Canada and Mexico and half of Europe when they all tried to bomb Carolinia off the map. They’d claimed they couldn’t let someone as powerful as Lehrer rule a country, but everyone knew the truth: Lehrer declared Carolinia a witching state, and that was something the mundane world would never allow.

  Meanwhile, Noam had done . . . what, exactly?

  He’d hacked a few websites. Gone to some protests.

  Hadn’t made a bit of difference.

  Brennan would’ve said he was too young to change the world on his own, but Lehrer was proof that age was no excuse.

  He noticed Ames was gone an hour or so into the movie, right after the part where Lehrer closed Carolinian borders for the last time. Her cigarette was a cold butt abandoned on the windowsill, popcorn bowl empty.

  “Be right back,” he murmured.

  He slipped down the hall to where a sliver of amber light glowed from the door to the boys’ bedroom, left ajar. Noam didn’t mean to eavesdrop, not really, but there was no other excuse for the way he started to step softly as soon as he heard the low murmur of voices from within.

  “ . . . let it get to you,” Ames said, and when Noam moved closer, he could see her through the half-open door. She had her hands on Dara’s narrow hips, head leaned in so her brow rested against his. She hadn’t seen Noam, but Dara did almost immediately.

  Their gazes met. Dara’s eyes were coals gleaming in the lamplight, the expression that flitted across his face nearly inhuman in the moment before he grasped Ames’s arms and pushed her back. She looked over her shoulder. When she saw Noam, her mouth twisted.

  “Sorry,” Noam said, lifting both hands. “Just looking for Ames.”

  She glanced at Dara, who said nothing.

  “Be right back,” Ames said, after the silence had stretched on just a beat too long. She moved away from Dara and out into the hall with Noam, pulling the door shut behind her. “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Is he all right?” Noam kept it just above a whisper.

  Ames exhaled softly, then said, “C’mon” and tugged him after her across the hall into the girls’ bedroom. She didn’t bother turning on the light, just shut them in, the room lit only by the gray moonlight from outside the window. “Listen,” she said, keeping one hand on the doorknob. “It’s not a big deal. It’s just . . . complicated. Dara and Lehrer don’t have a great relationship, and Taye can be kind of oblivious.”

  “What happened?” Noam asked.

  Ames made a strange, abortive little gesture toward her pocket, then muttered, “Damn, left my cigarettes” and dropped her head back. Sighed. “You’d have to ask him,” she said eventually. “It’s not something he’d want me to share around, you know? Anyway, just . . .” She waved one hand. “Just keep it in mind. Not all of us had a great, loving fatherly relationship.”

  Noam bit his cheek over what he could have said in response to that. Instead: “Clearly it goes a little past that.” Shitty father-son relationships didn’t make people try to hack the Ministry of Defense.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Ames said. “I know Dara gives you a hard time, but he doesn’t usually hate people for no reason. That includes Lehrer.” She opened the door and stepped out into the hall again. “I’m gonna make sure Dara hasn’t finished a whole bottle of gin on his own, okay? I’ll be out later. Hold down the fort.”

  She clapped Noam on the shoulder and flashed one of those fake smiles that didn’t reach her eyes. He watched her disappear back into the other room, to Dara and Dara’s gin and Dara’s secrets. To whatever else they’d been doing, Ames with her hands on Dara’s body and their lips so, so close.

  Bethany and Taye were still watching the movie, popcorn bowl lodged between their legs and Bethany’s head against Taye’s arm. Noam took Ames’s seat by the window instead. He didn’t smoke, but he lit one of Ames’s cigarettes and took a few drags anyway.

  An hour later, Ames returned to claim her chair and cigarettes, and in another hour, Dara emerged from the bedroom wearing something black that clung to his body like it was painted on. He didn’t say a word. Just walked past the chairs and the movie screen, the edge of his coat grazing Noam’s thigh as he stepped over a forgotten glass on the floor.

  He smelled like liquor and left through the front door. He didn’t come back till morning.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Monday, Lehrer was making coffee when Noam and Dara showed up for their lessons, seemingly having forgotten all about the incident at the government complex. As he shook ground beans into a filter and Noam and Dara dumped their satchels onto the floor, he spoke.

  “Dara, at the table, please.”

  Dara only made it two feet before he came to an abrupt stop.

  Noam looked.

  On the table was a small iron cage. In the cage lay the body of a dead goldfinch.

  “I thought we’d try this again,” Lehrer said to Dara, watching him as he poured water over the coffee grounds. “You’ve had plenty of time to study.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “Not with that attitude, surely.”

  One of the chairs at the table pulled out by telekinesis. After several moments, Dara sat.
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  Noam opened his book and held it up just high enough so he could still see over the pages. Dara stared at the dead bird like it was something horribly contagious.

  Lehrer took the seat opposite Dara, crossing long legs and balancing his coffee cup on his knee. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said, and Dara’s cheeks were bloodless.

  Noam turned a page in his book, just for show.

  “I don’t even know healing,” Dara said, clearly stalling.

  Lehrer said nothing.

  Dara exhaled and lifted both hands, fingers hovering over the iron bars of the cage. He trembled, very slightly, with the effort.

  And then—

  —the bird’s still body shuddered once and flopped onto its stomach. Noam muffled a gasp against the pages of his book as the bird rose on unsteady legs, wings twitching spasmodically.

  He did it, he really did it, Dara—what the fuck, how could someone possibly . . . that bird was dead. Dead dead. Noam had never heard of anyone doing anything like this, not ever, not even in legends from the turn of the millennium when magic was still young.

  If Dara could perform resurrection, he was . . .

  A cold shiver went down Noam’s spine, because if Dara could do this, there was nothing he couldn’t do.

  “No,” Lehrer said.

  The bird vanished.

  The corpse lay on the floor of the cage, had never moved.

  An illusion.

  “That,” Lehrer said, and Noam didn’t think he’d ever heard Lehrer’s voice with quite so sharp an edge, “was beneath you.”

  Lehrer set his cup on the table with a click of ceramic on wood. There was something too slow and precise about the way he moved, an intent that carved through silence.

  A spark of gold lit the air.

  The bird burst into flight.

  The sudden violence of it seared straight through Noam’s veins, and he startled, book toppling off his lap onto the floor.

  The bird flung itself against the bars of its cage, a horrible screeching noise ripping from its throat. Its frantic wings beat too hard, too fast, feathers already gone bloody.

  This was wrong—completely, fundamentally wrong in a way that set Noam’s teeth on edge.

  “Stop it,” Dara hissed.

  The bird kept screaming. Lehrer watched Dara with mild interest, as if cataloging his reaction for future study.

  God . . . god, the bird collided with the cage again, its bones snapping like fine twigs. Bile flooded Noam’s mouth.

  “Stop,” Dara pleaded again.

  This time, at last, Lehrer nodded. The bird dropped like a stone, instantly and perfectly dead.

  Lehrer picked up his coffee cup again and took a sip. Dara was breathless, his hands in fists and his magic a green and quivering aura. The whole thing was disturbing, yes, but Dara was ashen.

  For the first time, Noam thought he understood why Dara hated Lehrer so much.

  Noam stared at the bird’s corpse, which lay in a lump of red-and-gold feathers, open beak pointed skyward. For a brief moment, he remembered the girl from the red ward, her face frozen in a death mask.

  “It felt no pain, Dara,” Lehrer said, with the impatient tone of a man who has said this many times before. “It didn’t have a mind. Just reflexes.”

  Dara’s next inhale shuddered audibly. “Even if I could resurrect it,” he said, clearly forcing the words past clenched teeth, “it would still be mindless. It would still be nothing, and nobody.”

  “Perhaps . . . very well. Take Noam’s seat. Read Hirschel’s Practical Virology, Volume 4.”

  Dara frowned. “That’s elementary stuff. You had me read Hirschel when I was twelve.”

  Complaining was a mistake. Lehrer’s gaze narrowed, and he tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Do as I say. Tomorrow, I expect you to come to our lesson prepared. Noam, move to the red chair.”

  Shit.

  If Lehrer could be that frustrated with Dara for being unable to do something so clearly impossible for everyone but Lehrer himself, what would he think when he turned his attention to Noam? Noam hadn’t read a goddamn word since he walked in.

  Still, he rose to his feet and collected his book and satchel from the floor. He met Dara’s eyes as they passed each other; Dara’s mouth was pressed into a thin line, a muscle twitching in his jaw.

  Dara’s gaze darted away from Noam just as quickly, back toward Lehrer. This glance was more furtive—but he headed for the bookshelves without argument, leaving Noam with no choice but to sink down into the burgundy-upholstered armchair Dara sat in moments ago.

  Noam watched, hardly daring to breathe, as Lehrer removed the birdcage and placed it under the table, out of sight.

  But when Lehrer turned that calm attention to Noam, it wasn’t to demand he perform impossible magic. He just had Noam run through a mind-expansion exercise, memorizing strings of numbers and then reciting them back after a filler task. As Lehrer put it, “Your antibodies to the virus keep it from killing you, but the more antibodies you have, the less magic is free to be wielded. Quite aside from the risk of inflammation, of course. Lower antibodies mean a more powerful witching. You have room in your body for lots of magic, so let’s make sure there’s plenty of room in your head too.”

  Noam recited the numbers without complaint, keenly aware of Dara watching him from across the room and of the dead bird under the table, his foot bumping the metal cage when he crossed his legs. Lehrer didn’t relent, not until the clock hand approached the hour—and then, before Noam could get up, Lehrer said:

  “No, stay here. Dara, you may return to the barracks and prepare for your next class.”

  Dara caught Noam’s gaze, one of his brows flicking upward. Noam couldn’t shrug, not with Lehrer watching, so he hoped the look on his face made it clear enough that he had no idea what Lehrer could want. Still, Dara took his sweet time packing his satchel. When he eventually left, it was without comment.

  Lehrer finished his coffee in one last swallow. When he got to his feet, it gave the impression of something unfolding, Lehrer’s height making the chair look diminutive by comparison. He gestured toward one of the bookshelves. “I need to take Wolf out, do you mind? That’s my dog.” He pronounced it like “vulf.”

  “Oh. No. Of course not. I can just wait here until you’re done.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll come with us,” Lehrer said. “You like dogs, don’t you?” Noam nodded. “Then it’s not a problem.”

  He gestured for Noam to follow as he crossed the room to one of the bookshelves and reached in above the spines of To the Lighthouse and Jeeves and Wooster to flick something metal. Noam sensed something deeper moving in the walls, a complicated set of steel mechanisms shifting and latching, completely unconnected to the lever, which Noam realized now wasn’t actually connected to anything at all. The apparatus was driven by magic, Lehrer’s magic, the switch just there for show. A panel of the wall directly to the right clicked and swung inward, exposing a carpeted hall. It was the same hall Dara disappeared down before, after General Ames caught them in the government complex.

  Lehrer stepped inside with the confidence of a man who’d done this many times. When Noam didn’t immediately follow, he looked back, motioning again with his hand until Noam followed after him. The hall was lit from overhead by little golden lights casting pools against the beige walls and blue rug, all soft colors and warmth. Was this where Lehrer lived? Would Lehrer really bring him home?

  Even with Lehrer in front, right where Noam could see him, Noam couldn’t stop thinking how easily Lehrer had quenched the life from the resurrected bird. He could do the same thing to Noam, here in the dim secrecy of his home. Noam would be dead before he hit the floor.

  “I’ll warn you,” Lehrer told Noam. “Wolf isn’t used to company.”

  He led them into a foyer of some kind, open doors branching out into other rooms. Noam caught glimpses from here: a sitting room, a library, the telltale electromagnetic hum of cu
tlery from what must be the kitchen. There was no tech at all. Nothing, not even a microwave, in this entire apartment.

  Noam didn’t have much time to stare, though, before there was the click of nails on hardwood floor, and Lehrer said, “Here, Wolf!”

  The dog bolted out of the sitting room, tail wagging so hard Noam was surprised it kept its balance. He could see where Wolf got the name: it had pale eyes and a clever lupine face, with the sleek body of a wild animal. Its thick coat gleamed, nothing like the mangy strays that wandered through the west side, and when Lehrer knelt down to scratch Wolf behind an ear, it made every effort to lick his cheek.

  “Good boy,” Lehrer murmured, smiling at Wolf. “You can pet him, if you like.”

  Noam moved forward, feeling a little awkward acting like this in Lehrer’s house, like he belonged here, could stand so close to Lehrer with Lehrer still in his dress grays and bend over to stroke Lehrer’s dog. He did it anyway. Wolf’s attention latched on to him almost immediately, hot tongue lapping at the underside of Noam’s wrist.

  Bizarre, to know Lehrer had killed that bird—twice, just to teach Dara a lesson—and yet he could be so gentle with Wolf. So affectionate.

  “He’s beautiful,” Noam said, glancing over at Lehrer, who watched with those silver eyes. Noam always felt uneasy to discover himself directly in Lehrer’s focus when he didn’t realize he was being observed.

  “Yes,” Lehrer said, “he is. And he likes you. He doesn’t like everyone.” Lehrer pushed off the floor, rising back to his full height. He held out a hand, palm up, and before Noam could blink, a leash and collar were in his grasp that hadn’t been just a second earlier. “Sit, Wolf,” he said. The collar attached itself around the dog’s neck, aluminum tags clinking as Wolf shook his head.

  “Let’s go,” Lehrer said, to Noam as much as to the dog.

  They headed back through the outer study, Wolf trotting happily at Lehrer’s side all the way out into the main corridor. It was empty, as Noam had come to expect, but there was life downstairs once they’d exited the stairwell out onto the ground floor. People kept giving Noam these looks, like they thought he wasn’t important enough to walk with the defense minister.