He sniffed, licked a little at the crust, then rested his head on my leg again.
“I’ll eat also,” I promised. “Here…”
It was the best sandwich I’d ever tasted. The bread was soft as moth wings, yet chewy and buttery and light. Rich with flavor and layers in the texture and complexity of the dough. The cheese was so soft and creamy and smooth, at first I thought it was Camembert. Not that soft, though. And saltier. Like a cross between Camembert and muenster. It was better than chocolate croissants, better than a six-course dinner, maybe better than anything I’d ever eaten.
It should have been easy enough to keep track, with everyone around us speaking French, yet I’d forgotten that we were in Paris. Of all the places we could have possibly come in this beautiful city… A cemetery for dogs and cats. And a tomb for witches and wolves.
Tears fell on the brioche still in my hand as I chewed. I couldn’t feel them on my face, but tasted them as damp, extra dots of salt as I took another bite.
Jason rolled his eyes to watch me. The whites were bloodshot.
I tried again. “Jason… Can’t you eat something? You need to. I know you don’t feel good. There’s plenty for me here also. One for you and one for me. Here… Please?”
He licked, opened his mouth to nibble at the brioche, then turned his head away.
I leaned all the way forward on myself until I could rest my forehead against his, holding his head in my hands. “I’m sorry, Jason.” In a breath, hardly a whisper, more tears wetting his fur that was smeared in dried blood from his ears. “I would bring you salmon if I could. Jellied eels. The best fish and chips in London, remember? I’m sorry I was inpatient with you there… That bouillabaisse from Gabriel at the hotel? We have to get back to London for that, right? All of it? And what about lobster? Or crab? Have you ever had king crab legs? I should have found you some in Portland. I’m sorry.”
Milo had been snapping at us again and finally stomped to us. “Lunch break’s over. Go and do your … whatever, so we can go to bed.”
Jason stumbled to his feet and back to Tayron.
Tayron wanted him to change so he could study the ears and keep the record flowing.
Jason panted and shivered.
Tayron gestured eagerly, telling Milo to relay the message, beaming down at Jason.
While Milo started with his notes, I slipped the plate, including one and a half sandwiches, around behind me into the bathroom doorway. Over the course of the next minutes, I gradually slid it out of sight around the wall edge and against the side of the bathtub. I had to do this with my cuffed hand.
Milo never looked up.
When Jason changed back into his skin, it turned out his ears were fine.
Tayron found this fascinating. He hopped around, bouncing on his heels and talking a mile a minute at Milo and notes. Like the tail and fur and whiskers, the upright ears were extra. Not a human-shaped ear turned into a wolf ear. A whole new area grown for the wolf shape.
Almost at once, he started shouting at Jason to change back. Now he wanted to see if, when he returned to fur, his tips regrew, or if they were only healed over, and was there a difference in healing between magic wounds and blades?
Milo rolled his eyes and talked him out of it, prompting Tayron to return to his notes and make proper use of this next change, not throw it away on a curiosity.
While they did this, Jason was on his knees, sideways to me and six feet away. He was rocked back, spine arched, breathing hard. One hand supported his forward weight on the floor while the other rubbed his eyes. The choke chain pulled around his neck with the chain leash dangling from it and coiling on the ground.
Could I send him a shield now without their knowing? The food had made me just clearheaded enough that I thought I was capable of trying a tiny spell—and that I could never get away with it.
Tayron selected a razor blade and made a check in his notebook.
Jason caught my eye. He mouthed something. Two or three words.
“What?” I mouthed back.
His eyes flashed to Milo, then me. “Talk to him.”
Talk to him? To get us out? Or gain information?
How was I supposed to think of something like that while Tayron was coming for Jason, telling him to put out his hand? How was I supposed to think about that when Jason extended his right hand on cue, palm flat on the floor, fingers spread as the mage demonstrated? How was I supposed to think about that while Tayron cut off the first joint of his last finger with the blade and little finger with magic? And blood sprayed across the floor and Jason bit into his own left arm, eyes shut?
How?
Chapter 39
Jason changed five times and had two more seizures before Tayron decided he could quell his own curiosity enough to try extending Jason’s life once more—pausing his research.
In between the changes and seizures, while Tayron was studying and Jason was gasping, staggering, or stretched on the ground, I tried with all I had left to talk to Milo.
“I’m sorry we’re keeping you up,” I said, sitting on the floor with my back against the bathroom doorframe, facing Milo, left arm around my drawn-up knees.
Milo had his chair rocked back on two legs, doodling in the notebook with a finger pointed at the pen instead of taking notes. Tayron was having to wait again, reading from other notebooks while Jason lay shuddering on the floor under the table in a pool of his own blood.
I used the white light shield, I grounded and stretched for power and focus and blocking of evil. But only in the hints I could muster as I also shook—and only on myself.
Tayron laughed at something he read and tapped the page with a forefinger as if admiring the wit of one of his own thoughts in ink.
Milo started a figure eight with his fountain pen.
I swallowed. “That’s a lovely pen. Is it real gold?”
Doodle.
Jason coughed and vomited up blood.
Focus. It’s the one thing he asked of you in return. Focus.
I struggled for a white shield that kept Jason from my sight: only Milo in the room, straight ahead, tunnel vision.
“Didn’t they want to talk to me? About finding this place? No one’s come to chat.”
Milo shrugged. He let the four legs of his chair thump to the floor, narrowly missing a black rat that was flitting past, licking at the patches of blood.
“When they can be bothered,” Milo said, taking the pen with his hand.
Tayron looked up. “What?” In French.
“Nothing.” Milo waved to indicate that this conversation was none of Tayron’s concern. The older mage went on reading, elbows on his drafting table as he leaned in.
Milo yawned, set the pen aside, and tore free his doodle sheet from the notebook. He began folding it into a paper airplane.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” I said. “I was able to scry your front door, came right here to ask you something with no trouble, and not one mage has asked me why I bothered in the first place. Why we wanted a word. That would have been my first question. But I’ve always been curious—and never been a wild mage. I can’t pretend to know you well.”
Milo smoothed folds in the airplane. He finally glanced at me from under the cowboy hat and through his own tobacco smoke.
He sat back, tossed the plane into the air. It soared several times around the room, making the crows call out and the small animals scuttle and jump as it passed.
It returned to his hand and he again looked at me. Still didn’t say anything.
I met his eyes. “We were looking for someone in the North of England. It didn’t have anything to do with you. Then we were attacked by reavers. You know? Faie, or elementals, or kindred, who have been murdered and reanimated as eyeless fiends that do the bidding of the caster who awakened them? A friend had to explain to me what they were. They almost killed us. I speculated that wild mages used to be able to create reavers. But there were no wild mages anymore, right? Nope… Another friend t
old us to try Paris. I scried and here you were. Now…” I smiled weakly, still struggling just to breathe. “I know you weren’t in Cumbria sending reavers to kill us. Someone else did that. Someone who is either a wild mage, or this reaver summoning magic is not the secret that I’m thinking it must be.”
Milo sniffed and turned again to face the table, where he went back to work on his sheet of paper. He unfolded it, severed the bottom cleanly by drawing a finger along it so he had a perfect square, then began to fold that into a new shape.
“Any caster with enough skill might summon a reaver,” he said long after I’d thought he was through with me.
Breathing carefully, tunnel vision in place. “Really? I didn’t realize… You’re far more powerful than myself—and clearly have more training. If I tried to cut a piece of paper like scissors with magic it would look like I’d chewed it apart. How do you know about the reavers?”
He lifted the cigarette from his mouth and gestured impatiently. “Any skilled caster might do any magic. In theory only. ‘Skilled’ is the keyword. Not ‘wild mage.’ One need not be a Frenchman to cook French food. Although it should be better in his hands.” He kept folding.
“You think any old English mage could have taken a whim to make reavers and done it? There’s no special study? I mean, I didn’t even know about them. I wouldn’t have a clue how to begin, what the spells were, even how to catch a living faie in the first place.”
Milo pursed his lips. “Well … summoning a reaver is advanced. Probably not an English mage.”
“Maybe not… Maybe a … where are you from?”
“My people are French, Austrian, and Italian. I am from magic. I am from the spirit of the wild mage.” He sat back with a paper crane in his hand.
The bird flapped and also took off around the room. It stretched its long, sharp beak, flapped like a humming bird, and zoomed into every corner until it jabbed Tayron on his also sharp nose. He swore, jumped, shouted at it, and it burst into flames, spilling to ash across the table and floor.
Tayron prodded Jason with his foot, ordering him to change. Jason gasped and coughed and tried to turn onto his side while Tayron muttered about the delay.
Milo gave the older mage the finger—I hadn’t known it was such a universal gesture—and pulled a fresh sheet from the notebook to start again while they still waited on Jason.
As Milo cut, then folded, I said, “That was lovely. The bird. Your magic is seamless. I’ve never seen anything like the magic you all do. It’s like mundanes’ ideas of magic rather than how most casters actually use magic.”
“That is because most casters are weak, unimaginative, feebleminded, and powerless. What did I say about ‘in theory?’” Milo kept folding.
“Oh. You could be right. So you were born to this? Always involved in wild mage arts?”
He didn’t answer.
“I’d never seen a reaver. Scary creatures. I suppose your boss would be interested in them—”
“My boss?” Whipping around to fix me with a glare.
I glanced at Tayron but didn’t answer.
“I’m fulfilling obligatory tasks to meet my room and board. No one here is my ‘boss.’”
“Of course. I’m sorry. I guess I don’t know anything about wild mages either, or your own personal structure in the household. How many are here?”
“Eight.” He turned away again to his paper. “There are always eight in residence. Eight is the most powerful number—infinity. Sometimes there are temporary students if they’re willing to pay enough, but they’re rare. Few find us to ask. The well-connected networker who does get a look in is seldom accepted even as far as an interview.”
“Because they’re too stupid?”
“No…” He fiddled with his paper and redid a couple of folds. “They have brains just to find us and ask in the first place. They are most quickly turned away for lack of imagination. Human imagination is the limit of human magic. A man who arrives with stars in his eyes instead of galaxies will not even be accepted by the cat.”
“Did you come here by asking to be a student? They must have liked what they saw.”
“I was better connected. One of the old mages here now is my uncle. I have seen a few students come and go. Six months is usually the limit. They do not want all the wild magic arts to die out. Yet they guard their rights and powers so jealously that they will only open the doors to outsiders so far. Over the course of a decade they might have a dozen students in and out. Certainly no more.”
“So, they’re out there? A scattering of people with wild mage skills and spells? All mages? You don’t take witches?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because we would have to change our name.”
“That’s the only reason?”
He sighed and leaned in over his work for tiny folds. “The order is roughly two and a half thousand years old. There were no women then. There are no women now. Would you want to live here? There aren’t exactly suffragettes protesting in the streets at the unfairness of not being able to move in with us. I don’t think anyone is broken up about the segregation.”
“So your students, those few men … where do they come from? Where do they go back to? Around Europe?”
“Why?”
“Well, it could be true then, couldn’t it? That someone with wild mage training is summoning reavers in England?”
“Have there been English students, you mean?”
“Not necessarily. Although if you knew of anyone who left here for England…” I thought about my breathing, my shield.
Jason was on his hands and knees, trying to change, but panting, sweating, bleeding.
Milo sat back from a tiny dragon. Complete with four sharp feet, a long tail, and open jaws, it strutted jauntily around the table with its knobby little wings beating and smoke puffing from its mouth.
Milo watched it strut. “Why don’t you scry the summoner?”
“I can’t see them.”
Finally, he looked at me. The paper dragon also stopped and looked at me.
“You scried here? Yet you can’t scry some douchebag summoning reavers in Britain?”
“I guess not. I’ve tried. There are many people involved. Casters and maybe other people who have been murdering shifters in England and other places. We’ve been trying to find them. Once we figured this out about the reavers, we thought finding someone who can do the magic to make reavers would be the next step. But I haven’t been able to scry these people all along. They’ve blocked me.”
Milo stared at me. The dragon stared at me.
“They blocked you? Yet you saw us? These casters are more powerful than us?” Voice and eyes both blazing. He slapped the table and rounded on Tayron, who was all ready to start taking notes again, prompting Jason.
Milo yelled at Tayron in French for a minute, gesturing wildly at me and around the room with his cigarette as if the sky were falling and I’d predicted it.
Tayron frowned and shook his head and apparently indicated that I was mistaken, then lectured about Milo getting back to his notes as Jason finally managed to change again.
The conversation continued in fragments over the next hour as I fought to hold onto the thread, and myself—and not Jason.
While Milo wrote and smoked—and Jason convulsed and yelped—he also muttered to himself, sometimes me.
“They should be talking to you. What sort of trick?” Lots in French. He meant the other wild mages should be interested in talking to me.
Tayron clicked his stopwatch to indicate the end time of a seizure and Milo had another break when Jason seemed to be unconscious.
Milo turned to me again. “Tell me, really, how did you get this address? You tell me that and I’ll see what I can remember about anyone who’s left us for England in the past few years.”
I swallowed, willing myself to focus—not looking at Jason.
“I went with some of my friends, whom you have locked downst
airs, to meet a druid. The druids and vampires have experienced losses, along with shifters, and they’ve tried to help us. We discussed reavers and wild mages and Paris. So I had that much. It was a specific scry. That helps right there. I asked the magic to show me if there were wild mages in Paris. I saw the door to this house, address, everything. But, before I saw it, and after, I tried scries for other questions—who made those reavers, where were they now, and so on. I saw nothing helpful. Only that one clear vision of this address.”
“What about magical interference?” Eyes narrowed, drilling into me. “That druid? Who else was in the room?”
“A druid and shifters.” Shaking my head. “There was only one other human even in the building and he was not a caster. He was … texting with his wife, if I remember correctly. If he’d somehow used magic on me, I’d have felt it in an instant. He was sitting right there. But he wasn’t a mage. I’m positive. I know you think I’m a feeble witch aside from this scry thing, but I know that much. If someone uses magic right beside me, I’ll notice. You can feel it in the air. That was all. Just a few dogs in the room also.”
“So they were in the building?”
“Well…” I lifted a hand and wrapped it around my leg again. “I admire your imagination… But I don’t think it was the dogs any more than the druid. Anyway, what is it you think someone did to my magic? All that happened was I saw this address.”
“Someone could have sent you the address in a fit of rage, wanting us to be attacked by the likes of you lot.”
“Attacked?” My voice cracked, startling me, making Tayron look around. “Us attack you? Is that what you said? We knocked on your door. That was it.”
“In order to attack.” He sat back, crossing his arms. “All fools hate wild mages. Hardly as if we have no enemies. If anyone knew you were looking for us because you thought we were trying to kill you with reavers, clearly you would be an enemy of ours. Any other enemy of ours would be glad to hand over our address with the hopes that you would come here and use your wolves to rip out our throats.” Glaring into my eyes, contemptuous and dead serious.
Moonlight Whispers: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (The Witch and the Wolf Pack Book 8) Page 27