Jarod whistled. “I like your attitude, Istvan.”
“Paint safely,” Istvan said in farewell.
“I won’t fall off.” Jarod’s tone was one of long-suffering. Evidently, he’d reassured people of that fact countless times.
In the few minutes he and Jarod had spoken, the pedestrians on the street had increased in number. They exchanged surprisingly warm greetings with Istvan as he followed his beak to the barbeque stall. He frowned over that. Back on Elysium people had mostly nodded to him or slunk away at his approach to avoid encountering a magistrate. Admittedly, things were different in a migration and he had laid the foundations of Justice. And yet, this still felt odd.
He almost choked on a delicious grilled catfish when the solution to the puzzle occurred to him.
His and Jarod’s conversation had been loud. The people on the street had heard Istvan express concern for Amy and her adopted human family. He had considered that Jarod’s reputation might benefit from Istvan, as magistrate, acknowledging the human boy. What Istvan hadn’t factored in was that people’s perception of him might change.
On Elysium he’d spent centuries as a personally remote deliverer of magical justice, that is, as a magistrate. But here on Earth, his oath bond to Amy as his familiar had somehow morphed his role in her life into one of quasi-paternity.
In Justice, people now saw him as a person, and not (or not solely) as an authority figure.
Arthur, Peggy’s husband, popped up at Istvan’s side, coat pushed back and thumbs tucked behind the braces that held up his trousers. “The wife’s after me to build a fire pit and smoker at the rear of the kitchen yard.”
“Ah.” Caught out cheating on his cook, Istvan shuffled his paws.
The barbeque stallholder grinned widely.
Arthur hadn’t finished. “Me, I think a person has a need to wander sometimes.” He stretched his braces. “No doubt, I’ll be building that smoker, though.”
“No doubt,” Istvan agreed.
Arthur winked at him and ambled on, followed by two of his sons and a granddaughter. She winked at Istvan, as well.
“Family.” The stallholder turned to his next customer, a dryad who wanted a skewer of mushrooms.
“Family, indeed.” And Istvan had one now. How the world had changed, and the people in it. Disconcertingly, he liked the sense of inclusion. What was the word Jarod had used?
Satisfied.
Yes. Istvan swished his tail, contentedly. For all the challenges of the Migration, he had a sense of being where he was meant to be.
Which made the mystery of humanity’s orb and the unknown extent of the threat the bathumas represented all the more disturbing. There were global issues to be considered regarding the orb, but also personal ones. The former concerned the Fae Council the most. Earth’s shield had to be protected. They couldn’t risk the Rift reopening.
However, Istvan also had private reservations. How might activating humanity’s orb change the world for non-magical humans like Jarod?
Chapter 15
Rory opened a portal to the bunker in the Pontic Mountains of Turkey. It was breath-stealingly cold when we stepped through. I shoved my gloved hands into the pockets of my wool coat and buried my chin in the folds of my scarf.
Istvan and Nora waited for us, talking quietly at the entrance to the bunker. Their beaks were close together, not quite intimate, but comfortably personal. Her golden plumage gleamed against the rock and snow.
“Well met,” Nora said in greeting. “The Fae Council are already gathered. We’re waiting to be called.”
Mentally, I translated that as her being kicked out of her own bunker. But given that she’d confessed to loving Istvan, perhaps she’d happily stolen this time alone with him. In which case, Rory and I had interrupted. They’d certainly looked cozy together. Humans weren’t the only people changed by the apocalypse. Maybe what Istvan wanted from life could change, if he let it.
“How is Chad?” I asked.
“No ill effects from channeling magic to the bathuma.” Nora flicked a wing, discomfited. “He hasn’t fed it again. It doesn’t show any signs of sentience.” Implicit in her statement was her justification: starving an animal was better than starving a person. The harsh logic of the Migration Faerene was the harsh logic of survival. Chad and any other volunteer donor’s wellbeing came first.
I glanced at the bunker tunnel, willing the Fae Council to hurry up. What more did they need to deliberate on? They’d ordered Istvan and me here to activate the orb. Here we were, plus Rory who’d refused to be left behind. “We need to know more about the bathumas.”
“I’ll be monitoring you assiduously,” Nora said. “Chad will monitor the magic in the environment. And you have Istvan.”
Was there a hint of envy in that last statement?
Fortunately, the Fae Council finally earned my gratitude. With impeccable timing, Chad emerged from the tunnel to announce that they were ready for us.
If activating the orb went drastically wrong—or dramatically well—I’d be invited to join the Fae Council. Even after learning that they needed me to activate the orb, I remained undecided whether I’d accept an invitation to join their bench. Hopefully, activation of the orb would be a minor blip in world events and I wouldn’t have to face the question or any other major consequences. Quossa’s warning about trauma lingered in the back of my mind.
The four of us started in, Nora joining Chad to lead the way.
Quossa took charge of the meeting. He was the most scientifically minded of the Council members. He was also brusque and all but dispensed with greetings.
That suited everyone.
The orb sat on a blue cotton cushion on a table that placed it comfortably waist height for me.
“The magic that formed the orb and seals it is crude,” Quossa summed up the Faerene scientists’ analysis of humanity’s orb and their proposal for activating it. “Nonetheless, its very crudity, its reliance on the most primitive of principles, gives it power. We require your blood, Amy.”
I nodded. He’d warned Istvan, Rory and me of that privately.
Quossa continued. “By your blood we should all see or hear…experience what you do when you activate the orb. And if that fails, we will employ a memory charm to capture your observations. All you have to do is let it happen. Remember, you just want to lift the first layer.”
I nodded again, although my attention was on Chad.
The goblin scientist put a tray with a needle on it onto the table beside the orb. “Shall I?”
“Please.”
At home, I’d practiced using a needle on myself. I could, but my hands would shake too much with nervousness, and I refused to display weakness to the Fae Council. It wasn’t them I was scared of. The orb sat, shiny, black and mysterious, in the center of the room. The knowledge it held could alter the fundamentals of who I understood my species to be.
Neatly and efficiently, Chad drew my blood till it filled the syringe. He handed it to me, swabbed and slapped a patch over the needle mark, and moved back against the wall, out of the way.
Rory held out his hand. I put a drop of my blood on the back of it. He kissed my cheek, and the warm expression in his eyes helped. I felt my shoulders relax from a defensive hunch to an assertive, level position of confidence. I could do this, and I wasn’t alone.
After putting a drop of my blood on a paw Istvan held up, I went around the room similarly anointing everyone.
Fae King Harold sat on a stool beside Quossa. Piros loomed behind them.
What was left of my blood I put on the index finger of my right hand before setting aside the syringe.
Chad whisked the tray away.
Now, it was just me and humanity’s orb with Istvan and Rory behind me. They’d catch me and shield us if the orb exploded or anything else similarly dramatic happened. We’d practiced—not the explosion, but my approach to the orb. In the same way that I’d nudged a marble to roll five inches, I had to find
the edge of the final layer of the orb and lift it a fraction. Basically, I was to use the gentlest touch of magic that I could to break the seal.
All those ominous human stories that told of the trouble that came from breaking the seal on an ancient treasure had run through my mind overnight. But the alternative—doing nothing and neglecting potentially vital knowledge—was worse.
I concentrated on focusing magic at the tip my finger and into the blood smeared there, then brought my finger a hairsbreadth from the orb. Please work. I pressed my bloody fingertip to the orb.
My magic connected to it. I was touching my ancestors’ magical construct.
Don’t tear, don’t tear, don’t tear.
The connection held. Far more delicately than separating an onion skin, as I’d had to do once for a school biology lesson on using a microscope, the outer layer of magic rippled and the sealed edge parted.
“Child.”
It wasn’t a voice I knew, nor a language I recognized. It wasn’t even a voice. It was simply there in my head, in the room. Present. Known to me down to my bones, deep in my spirit.
I kept my gaze on the orb and my breathing steady. Maybe the connection to the orb would hold without effort on my part, or maybe the orb would reseal if I lost focus. I held my magic in a careful, continual stream, feeding the orb.
“The bathumas defeated us.”
Now there were no words, only images and screams: the bathuma’s life cycle, its hunting methods, how it could be hunted, my ancestors’ failure, and the creation of the orb. People talked the orb into existence, telling it their stories and their ancestors’ stories. Then I saw magic spinning out as silver ropes across land and sea and knotting together as if making lace.
Ideas regarding magic unrolled within me. Acua, the third eye, but not as humans had remembered it. Moksha, transcendence, which the Faerene followers of the Reunionist faith believed in, but in a different, and sometimes terrible, way. My ancestors had also dreamed of slipping the bonds of one world to fly free in the universe.
“You are our hope and for you to be hearing us, our hope was true. When we could not fight the bathumas any longer we trusted to those among us who had no magic. Our magic had limits, but they were still learning, the stone-workers and those who make metal. They call it bronze and it is hotter than the bathumas’ wings. They will make weapons and when they are strong enough, then we pray to the Goodness that together you will defeat the bathumas who prey on us.”
More knowledge of the bathumas and other threats that I didn’t recognize streamed through my mind. Patterns of magic flared and fell. I hoped that Istvan, Rory and the Fae Council were sharing this experience because so much of it exceeded my current comprehension. If they weren’t, if the magic of the ancient human mages had somehow locked them out, then the Faerene’s memory charm had better work.
Pressure built. The revelations reached an incomprehensible crescendo and the voice “spoke” a final time. “To you, children of our hope, we release our magic.”
“Elysium gods, no!” someone screamed.
But it was too late.
The first layer of humanity’s orb tore free completely.
The world shook.
Sirens shrieked throughout the bunker.
I fell, and Rory caught me.
No one had planned for a second apocalypse.
Want More?
Amy’s adventures continue in Rough Magic, out April 2020. Pre-order link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XFJR2RJ/ I know that it sounds like a terribly long time to wait (and that I’m a horribly mean author to make you do so), but my standalone novella, Blade Witch, will be out in December, and Space Specter in February 2020. I’m not lazing on the beach drinking mimosas while you’re desperate for the next book. I promise!
To stay up to date on new releases from me, please follow my author page on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Jenny-Schwartz/e/B0042MAD86
Current Series
The Faerene Apocalypse:
Stray Magic
Bound Magic
Loyal Magic
First Magic
Rough Magic
Interstellar Sheriff:
Space Deputy
Space Rodeo
Space Specter
Complete Series
Shamans & Shifters Space Opera series. Complete (for now):
Her Robot Wolf
Cosmic Catalyst
Shattered Earth
Jingle Stars
The Ceph Sector
The Old School series. Strong women saving monsters & solving mysteries.
Phoenix Blood
Fantastical Island
Storm Road
Fire Fall
Desert Devil
Amaranthine Kiss
Shangri-La Spell
The Collegium series. A secret order defends humanity from supernatural dangers.
Demon Hunter
Djinn Justice
Dragon Knight
Doctor Wolf
Plague Cult
Hollywood Demon
Alchemy Shift
Catch up with me at my Facebook page, on Twitter @Jenny_Schwartz, or at my website.
Jenny
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