by Kate Martin
He didn’t think she would be answering him. “So what do I do?”
“Learn to control your access to the myst. It is the slipping in and out that allows others to detect you. The labrynth that hunts you hunts through your connection to the myst. Conquer the myst, and you will be a hard thing to find.” She turned her attention back to the circle she had drawn earlier and began weaving lines back and forth within its confines. “Now, you cannot scribe labrynths of your own, that would be dangerous. And I cannot access the myst as you can, nor will I try. But I can scribe a labrynth that will lend you control, and through that control, you will learn to master your ability.”
Bri watched as her fingers moved back and forth so quickly it made his eyes cross. She was silent the entire time and her eyes seemed unfocused, as though what she drew and what she saw were not of this world.
With one final loop she finished, then grabbed his wrist with a strength unthinkable for a woman her age. Bri instinctively pulled back, but she did not let go.
“Are you ready?”
Ready to take the first step towards taking control of his life? No. Yes. I’m terrified. “Why can you touch me?”
“Alec touches you, does he not?”
“Alec sold his soul to Carma. He thinks he can touch me because he has no soul, and so the myst can’t see him.”
“Carma can touch you. She is full of souls.”
“It was just a theory.”
“Your theory is sound.”
What? He was beginning to see what Alec was talking about.
“Alec is no longer seen by the myst due to the loss of his soul. Carma is a demon, she was never a part of the myst in the first place. Demons were once seraph, you know, and they do not interact with The Grand Plan.”
He had not known that, but asking for a lesson on seraph did not seem pertinent at the moment. “But you aren’t soulless or a demon, so why can you touch me?”
“Because I do not want to be seen.” She released his wrist and pushed the left sleeve of her dress up to her elbow. There, covering almost every inch of skin from wrist to the crook of her arm was a labrynth so complex and beautiful, tattooed into her flesh.
Bri stared for a long moment, able to feel how the spell repelled the myst that still lingered all around. Through his own ability, he felt the myst’s curiosity, and its frustration. “You’ve removed yourself from the myst.”
“And thus from The Grand Plan. It means I can do my work without the interference of those seraph who like everything just so.”
“Can you do that to me?” Bri asked, feeling breathless.
“No. There is no need.” She replaced her sleeve.
“But I thought—”
“What happens when you look for your own future in the myst?”
“I see nothing. Darkness mostly. I’m blind to it.”
“Blind as the myst is blind. You operate outside of the Grand Plan. I suspect that to be the reason the seraph are so keen on finding you.”
“Oh.”
“So eloquent. Now, are you finished questioning me? Time is something we may not have in ample quantity.”
“I’m ready.” A lie, but he suspected he wouldn’t ever be able to answer truthfully.
“Then place your hand on this labrynth and make sure to keep listening to my voice.”
He’s returned.
Gabriel stood at the edge of the myst, her armor left behind in favor of more streamlined attire that would help ease her through the other plane. She could feel the boy’s presence. Every day since she had stolen his scent from Oriel she had returned to the myst, waiting, watching. She never stayed long, not wanting the singers to become suspicious, and not able to completely neglect her other responsibilities. She was sure there had been times when the boy had touched the myst and she had not been around to witness it. That was all right. She had known it would happen in good time. Their paths would cross.
She’d stood at the edge for the passage of only three breaths before she felt it, sensed it, that distinct combination of mortal and myst that clung to the boy. Her wings shook with anticipation.
She slipped into the myst. The singers paid her no mind. It was normal for one of her rank to visit from time to time, and she hadn’t been lurking or raising their awareness of her interest. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust them, but they had lived with the child’s presence for thirteen years, and had yet to do anything about it. They were too busy with other things, weaving and watching, making The One’s visions reality. Yes, the boy interfered with that, but that problem had been assigned elsewhere.
To Gabriel.
She moved through the myst with a familiar ease, keeping her wings tucked close. A few tendrils brushed her as she glided passed. The short life of a woman with three children, the ill fate of a newly built temple. All the while the scent of the boy beckoned to her. He was a warmth, a light, yet something cold flickered alongside that glow.
Following it, she sank deeper into the myst.
The presence of the boy grew stronger. Now she felt him like a pulse, an irregular heartbeat stranded in the middle of a smoothly functioning body.
In the distance, the ghost of a figure flickered in and out of sight. Small, too small to be one of the singers. The phantom never remained visible for longer than the blink of an eye.
Then it came again, closer. Almost close enough to touch. Certainly close enough to see.
The boy.
He vanished once again. But Gabriel could still feel him.
“Gabriel?”
Oriel’s voice. Gabriel ignored her. The boy was near.
“Gabriel!”
There.
Lillianna felt something odd just before Kai blew past her door, running so fast she was amazed he kept his feet. The boy looked like he had the whole of Hell at his heels. Or perhaps Haven would have been more accurate. Kai feared little in Hell. She rose to follow him.
In that glass room of his, on his knees in the dirt, his knife cast beside him, he scrawled dozens of lines into the floor. She smelled the blood from his fingertips.
“What is it, Kai?” Lillianna studied him carefully, looking for clues in his body as he scribed, watching for indicators that he was about to snap.
“He’s there! I can find him!” Not once did he stop his frenzied movements.
“How do you know? What’s going on?”
“I set a trap for him. A trap that would signal to me when he touched the myst. He’s there now, and he’s not as lost as he usually is. Something is helping him control it.”
That could be very bad for their plan. “Find him. Don’t let him get away.”
Kai assembled his labrynth with a violent pull of both his arms. Though his fingers already bled from his careless scribing, he pulled his knife from his belt and sliced both palms before slamming his hands against the complex lines.
The power that drummed from that action staggered Lillianna, forcing her to reach for the door for balance.
Then the entirety of the manor began to shake. The floor heaved as though shaken by an earthquake.
“Kai!” Lillianna said.
The boy didn’t answer.
She grabbed the wall with both hands. All of Hell must feel this. He will bring the entire place down on us. “Kai!”
The sound that answered her was neither a laugh, nor a cry, nor was it anything sane. It made her skin crawl. “I have him!” Kai’s shoulders shook as he spoke, his hands pressed so deeply in the dirt they were disappearing from sight. “I have him! He’s mine!”
Alec had watched the hourglass fill and turn over more times than he dared to count. He had promised to be there for Bri, yet when Dorothea had taken him through that door, the door had vanished. He had no way of getting to them, no way of knowing what was happening. Carma would kill him if anything happened to the boy.
He would never forgive himself.
He had paced the entire room dozens of times. It was likely he knew every bottl
e, every book, every bone Dorothea had stashed there. He tried to sit, but nothing was comfortable, and he couldn’t relax. Tending the fire had occupied him for only so long, as had trying to read some of the more mundane books on the shelves.
Finally frustration and boredom brought him back to that one corner. The one he’d been avoiding. The one where the locket hung.
His feet seemed to move of their own accord. He didn’t want to see it. Didn’t want confirmation of what he already knew. But the corner came closer, and closer still, until the locket was only a hand’s breadth from his nose.
How is it here?
Then it was in his hand, cool and smooth, just as he remembered it. The water lily molded into the silver caressed his thumb, the rises and falls of its shape far too familiar. The edge of his nail still fit so easily into the indented latch.
Alec closed his fist around the locket. He didn’t want to open it. It held the memories he didn’t want to relive. Memories of a time he had left long in the past. Faces he had kept securely in his memory, still so vivid even after two millennia had passed. Faces he feared he had not remembered as perfectly as he liked to think.
He couldn’t face them if he had forgotten even one detail.
Yet the temptation…No. I can’t. Forgive me, both of you. I’m not strong enough.
He heard the click of the latch and felt the tiny hinge give way.
A clench of his fist snapped it closed once again.
He shoved the locket into his pocket where it felt like the cool metal would burn a hole into his thigh. A fitting penance.
Tripping over the multitude of detritus spread across the floor, Alec made his way to the cabinet he had located hours earlier, and pulled out a bottle of the hardest liquor Dorothea had.
The liquid burned down his throat, yet it cleared his head somewhat. A second swig had him coughing, which served to further draw his attention away from the last moments.
Just as he was about to press the bottle to his lips a third time, he heard the screaming.
— CHAPTER TWELVE —
The fact that he could hear the screaming implied that wherever Dorothea had taken Bri, it was still within the physical world. The magical doorway wasn’t a path to some other realm, but simply a way to keep people out.
So he beat at the wooden panels of the wall with everything he could find.
The screams were unbearable. They weren’t just screams of fear, they were screams of pain. Gut-wrenching, stomach-turning pain. Alec felt bones in his hands crack against the force of his onslaught against the wall, but he paid them no mind. Such small pains were nothing against the pain in his chest.
Memories he had tried to keep away rose up. Of a boy no older than Bri, with Alec’s father’s coloring, and their mother’s blue eyes. Marc. He hadn’t been able to save him, but he’d be damned if he’d let something like that happen again.
In his hand, the marble bust of some unknown woman beat against the wall, and the first crack appeared. Alec concentrated on that spot, hammering at it again and again and again.
Until the wood splintered and gave way.
The planks wrenched away easily after that, and Alec forced himself through the open space as soon as it was big enough.
In the flickering torchlight, Dorothea leaned over Bri who thrashed about, screaming to the point Alec was sure his throat would be bloody. One hand lay across a nearby labrynth, and did not—could not—move from that spot, as though he was bound to the lines.
Alec rushed to his side. “What the hell happened?”
Dorothea lifted a hand, and with a few quick flicks of her fingers, an invisible force pulsed from her and stopped Alec dead in his tracks, keeping Bri out of his reach. “Keep back,” she said. “If you touch him now he will die.”
“Hold him still then! Cel-Eza, Dorothea, he’ll break something.”
“Invoking your dead god will do us no good. I need him on his stomach. Help me flip him, but do not touch him bare flesh to bare flesh. If you pull him from the myst like this there will be nothing for us to save.”
Unwilling to question her, Alec knelt beside Bri and grabbed him by his clothed shoulders. The hand in the labrynth would not move, so Alec folded it carefully under the boy as he turned him onto his front. Bri struggled and screamed, tears running down his face, eyes wide open in terror. Alec held tight, pinning his shoulders to the ground with all the strength he had. The new position did not seem to stop the pain, or the fear, but it did keep the thrashing more contained.
Alec choked back his anger and fear and looked to Dorothea. “What happened?”
The old witch stood and walked to the wall. “Exactly what we wanted. He was learning control, walking through the myst like he never had before. But his hunters are clever. They were waiting for him.”
“They? You mean there’s more than one?”
Taking a torch from the wall and a long iron spike, Dorothea returned to where she had been kneeling. She held the spike in the flames. “Yes, more than one. They both grabbed hold. One is seraph, the other…” She shook her head and didn’t finish her thought.
Alec had to fight the urge to comfort Bri, to pull him into his arms, anything other than simply pin him down. “What do we do?”
“We improvise.” She pulled the iron from the torch.
Alec didn’t like the way she eyed the glowing metal. “Improvise how?”
Dorothea wrenched Bri’s shirt up, exposing his back. “There is no time to teach him now. I must break the connection to the myst and with it the two holds that have been placed on him. He does not know how to do that on his own, but I can do it with a labrynth. However, it must be a permanent mark, or he will have no time to recover. Hold him still.”
Alec grabbed her hand just before she touched the burning metal to Bri’s back. “The shock and pain alone will kill him!”
She pulled free of him. “Bah. He is stronger than anyone gives him credit for. Including himself. Now, hold him or he will die.”
Though he had already been chastised for the invocation, Alec did it again. Cel-Eza, give me strength. Give him strength. Silent One, if you have any mercy at all…
Dorothea began to scribe her labrynth.
Old scars on Bri’s back gave way to these new lines. She forced the circle onto his flesh, then began the lines that intertwined within. Her lips moved with silent words as she worked, biting her finger and letting her blood follow the lines. At certain intersections, she scribed runes—one for strength, one for defense, another for center, and one for healing. Some runes Alec could not identify. Eventually he forced his gaze away, unable to watch Bri’s poor flesh singe and burn. The screams were enough.
And then all went silent. Dorothea cast aside the iron and retrieved the torch from the floor. Bri went limp, each struggling breath the only sign of life. Suddenly conscious of just how tightly he had been holding the boy, Alec loosened each of his fingers, muscles cramped and aching.
Dorothea stood. “It is done. You may touch him now, though I doubt the myst will dare to come near him any time soon after what I just did to it.”
Alec gathered Bri into his arms before she finished speaking. He stroked the boy’s hair, listening to his ragged breathing and finding his own breathing not much better. One hand pressed over Bri’s chest, he searched for that heartbeat that would assure him everything was going to be all right.
“He’s really safe now?”
“Yes. Though the healing will take some time, and the aftereffects will linger. But he will cope, and he will learn.”
“How can he go back into the myst again if there are people waiting for him?”
Dorothea affixed the torch to its place on the wall. “Next time, we will be ready.”
“Gabriel!”
A slap accompanied Oriel’s voice. Gabriel opened her eyes, surprised to see the singer. “What happened?” she asked.
“You went after the child. Inside the myst.”
Gabrie
l sat up, realizing in that moment that she didn’t remember losing her footing. “I had him. I could feel him in my hand.” She’d seen him walking towards her, confidently, as if he belonged there. It had taken no time at all for her to cross the myst, reach out, and wrap her hand around his wrist.
Then she’d felt the air pulled from her lungs.
“Yes. And then he slipped right through your fingers. Quite violently.” Oriel’s look of disapproval grated on Gabriel’s nerves. “You brought a witch down on us. A very powerful witch. All the myst felt that. We were cast out.”
“But I had him,” Gabriel said, even as she stared at the glittering towers of the Citadel, not the blue and white swirl of the myst. They had indeed been cast out. All the way out. “If I had him once, I can get him again.”
“Not from in here. The myst is sacred, Gabriel. It is The One’s hopes and dreams. You will not come here and defile it again. I should report you.” Oriel held up a hand when Gabriel began to protest. A black mark on her record would end everything… “But I will not,” Oriel said, “If you agree to never come here unaccompanied again. If you want to access the myst, you will inform me, and I will guide you.”
What other choice did she have but to agree?
Sick, and still unsure of exactly what happened, Gabriel nodded. If nothing else, it satisfied Oriel and Gabriel was left alone.
Kai screamed and screamed, thrashing about the dirt floor as though he were in indescribable pain. He wasn’t. It was anger and frustration. Lillianna watched with little patience. Her home had stopped shaking, that was good, and no one had appeared at her door wanting to know about the source of the disturbance. That was also good.
Olin had yet to return. Good for Kai, since the other demon would surely beat him black and blue for this little stunt.
“I take it you lost him,” she called into the maelstrom of the tantrum. No answer, just more cries of despair and whatever human emotions plagued him. “I warned you. I told you to exercise patience, but you did not listen. Perhaps next time you will.”