Ashes Of Memory

by Aiden Bates

  “In a month,” Vance argued, “after negotiating pay and scope and terms and revisiting the treaty—”

  “Because that’s how these things are done,” Mikhail crowed, throwing his hands up. He glared at me as if I had convinced Vance of anything. “You dragons think you can snap your fingers and everyone just dances to your beat, but you know damn well that the cabals have specific terms and requirements for this sort of thing.”

  I put my hands up. “I’m not the one asking you to do unsanctioned work for Blackstone.”

  “Well, you’re not turning it down, are you?” he shot back.

  Vance sighed. “Mikhail—please. Do this for me. As soon as you find something out, you can let us know and then come meet us wherever we are if you want to. This is the smartest plan.”

  “No,” Mikhail said, holding a finger up, “it is not the smartest plan. It may be the most efficient, but efficient isn’t the same thing as smart.”

  “So you agree it’s the most efficient,” Vance pressed.

  Mikhail leaned on the back of one of the simple kitchen chairs. My place was spare, minimalist. I’d always been like that. Simple wooden chairs, simple table, simple house. Haval was born with all the style in the brood. That was our father’s influence. I found myself realizing that I didn’t know what I was going to do with the contents of his house after all this was over. If it ever was.

  “Obviously,” Mikhail breathed, “it’s the most efficient division of labor. But that doesn’t make it a good plan, Vance. Abyssal magic frankly terrifies me. And it terrifies you, too. It should terrify everyone; we should all be shitting our pants here.”

  “What scares me more,” Vance said slowly, “is finding out that while we were wading through bureaucracy, there’s a kid out there enduring unthinkable horrors. I know what people like that can do to a person, Mikhail. So do you.”

  Mikhail’s head drooped. He gave a long, heavy sigh. “Of course I know.”

  “I can’t let that happen,” Vance said. “It’s as simple as that, and I need you to do this for me. Sophia knew something. Maybe she still does. If so, we have to find out.”

  After a while, Mikhail nodded, but then looked to me with a worried and accusatory expression on his tired face. “He doesn’t know everything that happened before,” he said.

  Vance cleared his throat and raised a timid hand. “Hi, still here in the room,” he murmured.

  Mikhail raised an eyebrow. “All I know are the CliffsNotes. You want to tell him the full story?”

  “Mikhail,” Vance breathed, “this doesn’t matter, it won’t change—”

  “You don’t know that,” Mikhail pointed out. “And you deserve to. You’d already know, if this guy hadn’t bolted as soon as things got tough.”

  That struck an angry nerve, and I had to hold in a snarl to keep from sounding like an animal. “You weren’t there,” I said with controlled coolness. “Don’t judge me for things you don’t understand.”

  “Would you two please stop,” Vance groaned as he stood from his chair. He collected his plate and took it to the sink. He leaned heavily on the edge of the counter, his eyes closed tight for a long moment before he turned back to us, fresh resolve in his eyes. “Whatever happened before is in the past. I’m here now, and there’s a problem in front of us that I can’t ignore. Even if I did know everything that happened... and I admit that I am curious... it wouldn’t change anything. It would just dredge up pain that doesn’t matter anymore. Mikhail—we have to know what Sophia knew. It could be the difference between succeeding or dying trying to find Baz. Tam—whatever happened, I’m still going to help. So, you can tell me in your own time or not. Now can we all just focus on what’s important here?”

  Mikhail’s eyes dropped. He wasn’t happy with Vance’s reaction, but if he had more arguments to make, he kept them to himself.

  For my part, my heart ached to hear Vance lay down the law that way. He’d always been like that; the kind of person that looked at a situation, decided what needed to be done, and then informed everyone rather than asking. A smile tugged at the corner of my lips, even under the circumstances.

  Clearly, Mikhail was used to it as well. He finally rubbed his face and gave a brief nod. “Yeah,” he breathed. “Fine, I’ll… get set up here and see what I can find out.”

  “Thank you,” Vance said, his frustration still evident but fading. “I know you’re just looking out for me.”

  “For whatever good it does,” Mikhail muttered.

  Vance stifled a yawn. “I have an idea which direction we’re headed,” he told me when it passed. “We should get going. I need a nap, but I can do that in the car.”

  I frowned. “If you know where, I should fly us there.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “That would be faster,” he admitted, “but I’m exhausted. If I don’t get some rest, I won’t be able to focus, or keep myself…”

  I saw Mikhail’s jaw muscles flex briefly. “You don’t want a repeat of before while you’re driving or flying,” he said. He met my eyes.

  Vance watched us briefly before he rolled his eyes and went to the door out to the living room. “I’ll get my stuff,” he said. “We should leave as soon as we can.”

  When his footsteps reached the upstairs, Mikhail finally broke our staring contest and turned to sink into one of the chairs at the table, sullen.

  “I’ll take care of him,” I assured him.

  He snorted. “Like you did last time?”

  That was justified, and it stung, but Mikhail didn’t know the whole story any more than Vance did. Hell, parts of it were hazy for me, for that matter. “I won’t let him get hurt again,” I said softly. “We didn’t expect what happened back then. Now, I know what to look for.”

  Mikhail’s slender fingers went to his brow to rub as if he were getting a headache. “He’s not scared enough, you know,” he said. “You need to be extra scared for him. Don’t let him take risks, don’t let him run down some abyssal mage himself. He’ll want to rush in, save the day, he—”

  “I do know him, Mikhail,” I said, and tried not to take offense. “It seems to me that whatever he lost before, he’s still himself. Still Vance the conqueror, savior of the downtrodden. I’m glad to see that. It means the rest of him is still there, too.”

  The necromancer finally took his massaging fingers away from his brow and gave me a weak smile. “Yeah, he is. But… you know that you can’t get back what you lost. Right?”

  A fist crushed my heart slowly, made my eyes almost burn. I pushed that all away, but each time it came for me, it seemed to be a little stronger. “I know,” I murmured.

  “I wish it wasn’t like that,” he said. “Honestly. I want Vance to be happy, Tam—and he was with you, I think. I’m sorry if I seem insensitive. It’s not that I don’t feel for you. But he’s my best friend. He’s my responsibility. And the last time I left him alone for five minutes… well. I’m just as guilty as you are, maybe.”

  I didn’t have an answer for that. Vance himself had told me that what happened to him wasn’t my fault, but that hadn’t changed anything. I wasn’t absolved by it, just reminded that I’d lost something precious. More precious than I’d even known at the time. “I promise, this time will be different.”

  “I hope so,” Mikhail breathed.

  Vance’s feet tracked across the floor above us, headed for the stairs.

  “I told you before to tell him what happened,” Mikhail said, wiping an eye. “Uh… you probably shouldn’t, though. Bad advice. Any time he gets close to those memories, it makes his condition worse. So, if he asks—which he probably won’t—just tell him I said you can’t.”

  “You’ve had experience telling him no,” I pointed out.

  He shrugged as Vance came down the stairs. “Do your best.”

  Vance came through the doorway to the kitchen with his small bag. He eyed me. “Not bringing anything?”

  “I have a go-bag in the trunk,” I said. �
��Everyone here does. Just in case.”

  “Right,” he said lightly. “Shifter paranoia. I’d forgotten. Well, we should go, then.”

  Mikhail stood, and accepted a tight, long hug from Vance. “Don’t do anything stupid, for fuck’s sake,” he said as he held his friend.

  Vance gave a lopsided grin. “If I do, I’ll do it brilliantly.”

  They parted, and Mikhail held Vance by the shoulders. “I’m dead serious.”

  Vance raised an eyebrow. “Is that a necromancer joke?”

  “All my jokes are necromancer jokes,” Mikhail replied. “But that wasn’t a joke. Be. Careful.”

  “I will, Dad,” Vance breathed. He hugged Mikhail again, briefly this time, and then waved at the door. “All right. We should go.”

  As we left, Mikhail stopped me, and gave me a meaningful look. No words, no further warnings—just a pair of hard eyes that seemed to remind me that there was no escaping a necromancer’s wrath. Even if you died before they got around to it.

  I gave him a nod of acknowledgment in response. Messaged received. Then I left him, and went to the car in the driveway where Vance was already getting in the passenger side.

  When I was inside, he pointed northeast. “We’re going that way. I’ll try to get a clearer sense.”

  “There’s I-20,” I said. “Anyone going that direction fast would have to take the interstate to do it.”

  He waved at Mikhail, who watched us from the door of my place, smiling as he spoke, “Mikhail gave you the third degree, right?”

  I cleared my throat, and put the car in reverse. “He’s concerned about you. I get it.”

  As we pulled away, Vance sighed. “I know. Everyone thinks I’m fragile these days. Which… in fairness, I guess I am. Exhibit A, my recent collapse into psychic shock.”

  “You couldn’t help it,” I said, glancing at him. He looked embarrassed. “I know that.”

  He bobbed his head once, and leaned the seat back some before he clasped his hands on his lap and closed his eyes. “I’ll see what I can find,” he said. “It’ll look like I’m sleeping, but try not to shake me or anything.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He was quiet for a minute. A pressure built in the space between us, like he wanted to say something but was holding back. Eventually, the pressure must have gotten to be too much. He didn’t say much. But it was enough to gut me.

  “Thanks for what you did back there, Tam,” he said quietly, just more than a whisper. “It helped. And… I’m sorry.”

  The half-second delay between hearing it and realizing what he meant was enough to make it land like a kick to my heart. I looked over at him, but his eyes were closed, his face slack.

  He remembered. Something, at least. The things that I’d tried to focus on to get him grounded when he’d had his breakdown.

  Knowing that made it so much worse. Because Mikhail was right. It was part of the process the Custodes Lunae masters had used to repair the damage to Vance’s mind.

  Whatever either one of us remembered… we could never be together again.

  If we tried, Vance would die.

  6

  Vance

  There are twelve planes of magic. Every mage is connected to at least one of them; a trick of birth that no one really understands. What plane they’re connected to determines whether they’ll be an esper like me, a necromancer like Mikhail, or one of the other ten varieties. A few mages, prodigies, are connected to more than one.

  But even after that, most mages have some particular talent. It’s often the thing that identifies them early on. Some little skill that’s often innocuous at first, when we’re young and our magic just only just beginning to bud. For me, it was finding things.

  I always knew where my mom’s keys were. That was how it first showed itself. Nothing special, nothing flashy. But she caught on when I was about three. For the next three years, anytime she lost them—and sometimes when she’d just hidden them, trying to decide if I really was bound for the cabals—she’d ask me, and I’d do the same thing. Cover my eyes with my hands, turn around in a circle, and get some glimpse of what was near them. I was right, every time.

  Later, it grew to other things. By the time I was six, none of the other kids my age would let me be ‘it’ when we played hide-and-seek. There was no point; I inherently cheated, even when I tried not to. Shortly after that, I was invited to test at Custodes Lunae by Master Nkendi. And shortly after that, I only saw my mom one weekend a month. And then not at all.

  I always thought about that when I put my talent to work. It was a kind of mental ritual. Literally—like a key that had to be shaped just right so that I could unlock the place where that talent was. Covering my eyes and turning around in circles, except grown up, with all my collective baggage. It’s always like that. Mikhail can’t see a lingering spirit without pressing his thumbnail to the scar on his hand where he cut himself on a broken bottle after his uncle kicked him one time as a kid. We’ve all got something.

  As I jammed all my baggage into the keyhole in my mind, the ever-present psychic plane around me became a tangle of ethereal threads, each one laden with the dewdrops of psychic impressions, floating through a kind of fluid—raw psychic energy. I brought Baz to mind, and opened myself as psychic fingers brushed the loose yarn of the plane like a spider testing for vibrations. Each time I gathered Baz in my mind—the image of him, and the brief contact I’d had with the impressions he’d left behind at his family’s house—a pulse left me, washing across the threads of coalesced psi in search of a match.

  One of them came back positive, and I gave it the slightest tug to propel myself. A flurry of half-formed images passed through my mind as my psychic body rushed along the thread, chasing down the child owner. I slowed as I felt a sudden sense of nearness—as if he were just a few feet away. Whoever had him almost certainly had some kind of protection in place. No one can directly alter a person’s thread in the psychic plane, but they can certainly plant a trap on it somewhere.

  Baz was unconscious, that much I could tell. The vibrations coming from his mind down the thread were weak, unstructured, almost imperceptible. He was being kept under, either by magic or drugs. For a young dragon, probably magic. He’d burn through drugs fast. But being unconscious meant that he hadn’t seen where he was.

  I let my mind drift away from his thread, out to anything that might be adjacent. Psychic energy permeates everything, and makes connections through perception and proximity. From Baz to the vehicle he was in, to the ground beneath it, to another car nearby… to the driver of that car.

  New images emerged, clearer this time. Emotions came with them. Irritation, exhaustion—someone driving late at night and not happy about it. I was careful not to let myself go any deeper. I had my own baggage to worry about without picking up more. But through the driver’s thread, I could get more specific images. Not everything he saw; not without hopping a ride in his head, which would be very bad for both of us. Just the things he happened to focus his attention on, however briefly.

  I spoke up once I had it. “I-92,” I said without opening my eyes.

  The car jerked a bit to one side as Tam startled. “Fuck. I thought you were sleeping.”

  I smiled. “I did tell you I wasn’t.”

  “That was three hours ago,” he complained. “What have you got?”

  “Someone driving behind them,” I said. “I can’t see a tag, just taillights. But they’re still moving, and just passed exit 78, going north.”

  Tam gave a frustrated grunt. “Shit. They’ve got a big lead on us. Can you tell where they’re going?”

  I shook my head, eyes still closed. The driver took the next exit, and I withdrew from his thread before I opened my eyes. “Just north,” I said. “I’ll keep checking in on them, but my brain is starting to hurt. I need to rest.”

  “The only way to get that far is to drive it,” Tam said. He glanced at me, his eyes soft. “You take a nap. I’ll head for 92,
let you know when we’re there. Can you find them again?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Unless they cover their tracks again. But I’ll at least be able to tell where they did that. Baz is still out. If he wakes up, he’ll leave a trail.”

  “Which I’m guessing they know,” Tam muttered.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “If I were them, I’d keep him under until they get where they’re going. But no one can hide everything.”

  “Not from you, anyway,” he said.

  I gave a half-smile. “You know about my talent.”

  He stiffened slightly, enough that I could tell when it happened, and only because I somehow knew what to look for. “Mikhail mentioned it,” he lied. I could feel it in the words the way other people can sense texture by touching.

  But I let it go. Tam and I had history, I knew. It wasn’t that I didn’t know we’d been together—but I didn’t know what I’d told him, how far inside I’d let him. Everyone in the cabals was at least a little paranoid. We didn’t tell outsiders how our magic worked, rarely shared what our particular talent was. It was dangerous. Knowing a lot about how a mage worked was an easy key to getting in their blindspot and taking them down. Like the shifters, mages had a lot of enemies. A lot of them were other mages.

  So, I’d trusted Tam enough to tell him about my talent. Maybe even how it worked. I must have trusted him a lot for that to be true.

  It also meant that if the people we were after had an esper in their entourage—which, given the kind of work someone had done back at that house, was likely—Tam was a potential liability for me. All it would take was an invasion of his mind to find out anything I’d told him about my magic. And that could happen fast if the esper was good.

  “What else do you know about me?” I asked, drawing my bag up from the floorboard to use as a pillow between me and the door.

  Tam gave a strained sigh, glancing at me. “Ah… Mikhail told me I probably shouldn’t go into detail.”

  “I’ve got about a million failsafes in my brain,” I pointed out. “A lot of them Mikhail doesn’t know about. For the record. But I’m not asking about… that kind of thing. Just about my magic. Did I tell you about everything? How it all works, how I do it?”