by Ella M. Lee
Nicolas leaned over the table to see and then laughed. “Meteor,” he said. “Looks like blood and bond magic.”
Daniel’s eyes went to mine, wide and impressed. “How?”
“Flame and Meteor are closely related magics,” I said. “Flame doesn’t have Meteor’s full ability to control another person’s actions and emotions, but with a strong bond and access to the person’s blood, it can do small-scale dominations. I honestly didn’t know what would happen. I used to be able to do this in Flame and only guessed it would manifest here.” I paused. “It only worked because of how close we are.”
“Clever,” Nicolas said, his tone full of approval.
Daniel was still looking between me and his arm as though he had never seen either before. I waited, hoping he wasn’t angry that I’d attacked him, cut him, and used his own emotions against him.
After a moment, he smiled. “Well, that’s interesting as hell.” He held out his hand to me. “Will you show me again?”
An hour later, I was sick of blood magic. Daniel, who didn’t mind me cutting into him again and again, was immensely interested in how far my control over this kind of domination magic extended.
The short answer was: not very far. Domination magic was Meteor’s territory. Like I had told Dan, I could tap into it with Flame, but not well or deeply or reliably.
The trick I used on him had mainly worked based on luck. I had surprised him, I leaned on our strong bond of friendship, and he happened to be using a shield that only protected against magic and not physical attacks.
Now that he understood what I was doing, it was easy for him to deflect most of the power I used while trying to control him, and nothing worked as strongly as the first time.
He wanted me to try on Nicolas, but when he offered Nicolas the knife, Nicolas shot him down with a flat, “No.” His tone had been low and dangerous and very final.
Lastly, Daniel wanted to see if his transmuted lightning—a magic that could very well be a sibling of Flame or Meteor at its roots—could create domination.
I let him cut into me several times, but he couldn’t do what I had done, and I couldn’t explain it to him adequately. Finally, he gave up with a shrug.
I put my head down on the table, woozy from transmuting, with my arms bleeding, vaguely annoyed that I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet.
Nicolas came to stand behind me. Gently, he took my arms one at a time and deftly healed the crisscross of knife cuts on them. I shivered as his fingers ran over my cool skin.
Lamb? he asked silently, his tone soft.
Yeah, I’m fine, I thought back. I need to get going in a minute.
All right, he said. Be home at six tonight. Wear something lovely.
I looked up at him. He was studying me with an expression that bordered on sweet concern, and I really wished I had more time to spend with him today.
Can’t wait, I thought, smiling at him.
“Stop making gooey eyes at each other, please,” Daniel said. He was healing his own arms carefully. “Fi, as much as I’d love to see you surprise Ryan with some blood magic, you probably shouldn’t. I have a feeling he’d kill you out of misunderstanding. But tell him about what we did today and see if there’s anything he wants to try.”
“Yes, Lieutenant Darling,” I said.
I let my eyes linger on Nicolas for another few moments before I headed to the door. I smiled as he retook his seat, and he and Daniel started an incomprehensible conversation in Cantonese. I could have watched them forever, these two men who were so important in my life, but I had heaps of work and a date to look forward to.
“Nicolas was upset earlier when Dan asked him to try blood magic with me. Is it because of what happened to him in Smoke?”
It was afternoon, and I was seated in Ryan’s apartment. He had poured us tea, and I was going over my morning events.
“Likely, yes,” Ryan said. “Nicolas has control issues. Not with others, but with himself. He doesn’t like not having control over his mind and body. He has lost both before, and that haunts him. It took some convincing before he let me heal him when Jasmine first brought him to me, and he was reluctant to explain anything about himself or his gifts. Blood magic, even with someone he trusts, would be difficult for him.”
I remembered that Nicolas had told me he was uncomfortable with strangers touching his skin. This was just another aspect of that, and I could understand. I, too, would be terrified of anyone getting too close to me if I had been hurt as badly as he had been.
“I would like to see your blood magic, but it will have to wait until some other time,” Ryan said. “Teng would like me to do a baseline spectrometer reading on you. We would normally wait at least several weeks for your magic to settle, but he feels you’re ready. The sooner we do it, the sooner we can get a better understanding of your transmutation limits. Come over here.”
He beckoned me over to his worktable. Ryan’s apartment was almost as large as Nicolas’s. It was tastefully decorated, but instead of a huge sitting area like Nicolas had, Ryan had a fascinating array of equipment that looked like it belonged in a science lab.
His work area was covered with spooled wire, pieces of wood, stones, and enchanted tools such as eyeglasses and pliers. He had several large glass cabinets filled with magical instruments. It was not easy to discern the use for most of them, but I recognized a couple of the devices.
One was a portable spectrometer. It was an elongated palm-sized box, almost trapezoidal in shape, broken up by slivers of semi-precious stones. There were eight different stone types within it, one for each clan, using the closest stone attuned to that elemental magic. When aimed at a magician, someone trained in interpretation could read the output of the spectrometer to see the exact qualities of that magician’s magic.
Not all magics looked different from one another at first glance. Flame and Water did, for instance, but Flame and Meteor often appeared quite close. Smoke was easy to tell from Wild, but not as easily separated from Sky or Wind. Unless the magician used some specialized aspect of their magic that was only available to a specific clan—such as blood magic—a spectrometer was often the only way to get an accurate reading.
Ryan was setting a larger spectrometer on the table in front of me. This one was also a glass box, but it had space for what looked like fifty slivers of semi-precious stones. Each slot was filled with something different, and I wasn’t well-versed enough in gemcraft to know what everything meant.
Ryan made several adjustments to the box, reordering things within it.
“How long has Teng been in the clan?” I asked. “As long as you?”
“Not quite as long as me,” Ryan said, “but I think near to thirty years now. Maybe longer? I believe he came here younger than many others. He was only twenty-one or twenty-two. Certainly much younger than me.”
“How old were you when you joined?”
“Thirty-six,” he said. “I was already an established lawyer in China. I was teaching law at the time.”
“How did you end up in Water?” I asked.
“My story is not nearly so dramatic as some others. Magical clans were not mysterious to me. My sister was already part of Smoke. She’s almost a decade younger than I am, and she was recruited out of college. I was recruited by Water during a time when they were looking to expand their numbers dramatically. They were worried about how large and influential Smoke had become, and they wanted to have similar numbers. The caliber of Smoke’s members was intimidating to Water—Smoke only accepts the best.”
“Yet you didn’t go there?” I asked.
“I could have. They tried to recruit me, but Smoke’s type of research is too rigid for my taste. I like the freedom I have here. I am more of an artist than a scientist, really, and I don’t like to work under the same structure and rules that allowed Jasmine and Nicolas to flourish,” he said. “When Water approached me, they wanted my law expertise. Working for a clan sounded interesting to me, so I gave it a
chance.”
“How come your sister didn’t join Water after Smoke, like Nicolas did?” I asked.
“Water is too violent for Jasmine’s taste. She wanted a more peaceful clan, and you can’t get more peaceful than Verdant,” Ryan said. “Even before she was… How to put it? Moved to Nicolas’s project, she was already beginning to dislike her Smoke group’s singular focus on results. She had been talking for a while about finding a new group, but then I didn’t hear from her for months. That wasn’t unusual for us, but suddenly she called one night and insisted I visit Sydney for a week. Once I arrived, she blew me off, not showing up to any of the dinners we scheduled. After being stood up on the third night, I was annoyed and ready to fly home the next morning. But at about one in the morning, there was frantic knocking on my door. It was Jazz, dragging Nicolas with her. They were both covered in blood. She’d been stabbed, and he was babbling nonsense in French, completely out of his mind. ‘Wards, shields,’ she said, slamming my hotel room door. She kept repeating, ‘They were hurting him, I couldn’t just leave him there.’”
“So you rescued Nicolas,” I said. “Why? You didn’t even know him.”
Ryan smiled, turning the spectrometer toward me. He handed me an enchanted pane of glass like the one I had used with Teng. He also slid a piece of paper toward me. It detailed ten different wards, the runes and designs growing more complex as the list went on.
“I want you to copy each of these twice,” he said, “once with pure Water magic, once with transmuted fire magic. I’ll signal you when I want the next set.”
I thought he would ignore my question, but he continued talking as he watched the output of the spectrometer.
“At first, I helped Nicolas because it was what my sister wanted, and I never deny her anything,” he said. “But there were other reasons. He had fought so that she could escape. If they had been recaptured, she would have been executed. He knew that, and despite being hurt and out of his mind, he had gotten her to me. He was far more considerate and grateful than I would have ever expected. He kept telling me to leave him, to not get involved, to not endanger myself or Jasmine any further. But he desperately needed help. I knew he was brilliant. Everyone did; he was famous. He had to be good to have been one of Smoke’s top researchers, and I didn’t understand why he was so steadfast in his hopelessness. His abilities fascinated me, but he merely wanted them gone.”
I was halfway through the list of wards, struggling on the sixth one.
“No, you’ve mirrored it,” Ryan said gently. “Start this design over.”
I did as he asked, and he continued. “It was a risk, but I’m glad I helped Nicolas. I love him like family, and it makes me happy to see him thrive here. It makes me even happier to see that he’s improved the lives of others. Daniel, in particular, is a testament to how much good Nicolas can do when he puts his mind to it.”
I smiled. Dan was pretty amazing. Calm, balanced, funny, compassionate, a genius, and a lethal fighter. It was easy to see he got many of those qualities from Nicolas, and the rest from Nicolas’s various group members. It truly had been a group effort to nurture Daniel, and none of it would have happened if Nicolas hadn’t rescued him.
“It’s hard for me to know what to feel,” I said, copying the next set of wards. “On the one hand, Nicolas’s abilities allowed him to take a chance on me. On the other hand, if he wasn’t in Water in the first place, my group would have never been tasked with assassinating him…”
And my friends wouldn’t be dead, and my former life wouldn’t be ruined, I didn’t add.
“I don’t find it helpful to examine those scenarios,” Ryan said. “Life is what it is. The choices we make are always made with the best intentions, even if the outcomes are unexpected. I can’t have known rescuing Nicolas would lead to you coming here; no one could. I’m not sure I would have chosen differently even if I had known.”
“I wasn’t blaming you,” I said quickly. “Or… or anyone.”
“I know,” he offered, studying me with kind eyes. “That wouldn’t be in your nature. Daniel likes you because of your compassion. Nicolas likes you because of your forgiveness. I know you don’t think you can measure up to your peers, but you are wrong. You have many excellent qualities, each of which is valuable and important.”
I looked at Ryan with wide eyes. How had he known exactly the right thing to say to me? How had he known insecurity had been nagging me since practically the moment Nicolas had brought me out of my cell?
“You can stop now,” he said, gesturing to the enchanted glass. “I think we have enough data. Let me show you the results.”
In Flame, my spectrometer readings had been average. Moderate strength with Flame magic overall, and primary competencies in detection, shielding, and erasure, which was the ability to quickly undo magical workings.
In Water, my readings were just plain strange.
I had a strong compatibility for Water magic, especially elemental Water magic. This surprised me until Ryan pointed out that transmutation fell within the elemental specialty. When he broke down my transmutation readings, my affinity for Flame was understandably off the charts. I also had a minor affinity for Meteor, Wild, and Smoke. Not enough that I’d necessarily be able to transmute to them, but it showed that my ability was very powerful.
Transmutation aside, I had elevated affinities within pure Water magic, too. Detection, which had been my specialty in Flame, was present here. Alongside it were glamour and transference.
The last one puzzled Ryan. The affinity wasn’t high enough that I’d be able to use it, which was odd. Transference usually manifested at either zero percent or close to one hundred percent. A minor spike in it was baffling.
Ryan suggested that my readings might change over time, but it was helpful to confirm everything we suspected about my powers.
He then showed me his own reading, which was obviously maxed out in transference, as well as high in healing and glamour. Apparently those two often went together because of the subtlety required for them.
Nicolas’s reading was elevated in almost all areas, with glamour, detection, and healing being slightly higher than the rest. This made sense for Nicolas; he came from Smoke, whose magic was quite subtle. It was no surprise he had capabilities with the more subtle side of Water. I knew he hadn’t trained up his healing very much, but he had told me his specialty within Water was glamour, and that type of magic seemed to catch his interest. My own detection skills from Flame had caught his interest as well, and I knew he was a good detector even if he had no extra-special abilities with it.
Daniel’s chart was unique. He, like Nicolas, had elevated readings in all areas. Unlike Nicolas, his elemental was higher than anything else, and his transmutation readings were weird. Most transmuters’ charts looked like mine: affinity for one other clan’s magic in particular and maybe a minor spike in others.
Dan’s transmutation was high in every single other clan’s magic. In theory, that meant he should be able to transmute to any other type of magic. In reality, he had never been able to transmute to an existing clan’s magic, but he could create new magic.
“We have redone his reading half a dozen times,” Ryan said. “It’s never changed, and I’ve never seen another reading like it.”
“So that’s why our work is centered around him,” I said.
Ryan nodded. “He keeps his lightning transmutation a secret. There are people in the clan who have seen it, but not many know what they are seeing is actually a new elemental magic. They just think Dan makes his Water magic look flashy. While Dan is capable of protecting himself, we thought it best not to draw unnecessary attention to his uniqueness.”
That made sense. If it got out that Daniel was unique, he would be under a lot of scrutiny. Other clans, like Smoke, would want access to him for research. It was smart of Nicolas and Ryan to keep this hidden.
But someday soon, we’d form a new clan, and there would be no more hiding. We would all
have to face the repercussions of disrupting the magical world. One half of me was excited for something so huge to happen in my lifetime, and the other half of me was nervous about the safety of my new family.
Chapter 7
I was barely ready, still cramming myself clumsily into my heels, when Nicolas knocked on my door at six o’clock.
“You look incredible,” he said, when I let him into the apartment. “Extraordinaire.”
It was the absolute best compliment I could have received.
I had three dresses hanging in my closet and had chosen Keisha’s favorite: a Prussian blue silk affair. It was asymmetrical, the hem dipping from mid-thigh on my left to below the knee on my right, the bodice falling low between two thin straps. Its elegance had drawn my eye, although I had immediately returned it to the rack after seeing the absurd price. Keisha had laughed and snatched it back.
Keisha had also gotten me piles of makeup, even though I barely wore it, so I had decided to try some eyeshadow and eyeliner. I’d slicked my hair back into a smooth bun, intentionally exposing a lot of the pale skin of my neck.
When I looked in the mirror, I gave myself a barely passing grade. I’d never owned a dress so expensive, and I liked that the fabric fell in a more flattering way than cheaper options. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my appearance—my eyes were set wide, and my freckles were annoying blotches on my face—but it was hard not to look decent in this dress.
I was now happy I had let Keisha spend Nicolas’s money on it.
I looked down, blushing at his attention, but I was immensely pleased by his words.
“And you… you look… really amazing,” I said dumbly.
Nicolas was the sort of person who could show up to a wedding in ripped jeans and an old T-shirt and somehow outshine the bride and groom. His usual style only made his good looks more impressive since everything he owned was tailored, perfectly matched to his skin tone and eyes, and always appropriately elegant.