by Nora Roberts
“This may sound a little crazy, but I think this is where Fred and Arlys worked.”
Frowning, she shifted to face him. “Fred and Arlys? Why do you think that?”
“I grew up on the stories. I know you’ve heard them, but probably not as often or in the detail I did. I drew a sketch once, of Arlys at the newscaster’s desk, with the dead guy beside her. You know that story, right?”
“Her last broadcast from New York.”
“Yeah. I was about twelve, and thought it was really cool, so I drew it—the way I saw it in my head. When I showed it to Arlys, I realized, not so cool, not for her. But she said I got it right, and asked if she could keep it to remind her to tell the truth even when it’s scary.”
He took Fallon’s hand. “Come on.”
He led her out of the office, into the place with the desks, the long counter under the lights, in front of the camera.
“Put Arlys and the dead body up there, and that’s my sketch.”
“That’s why,” Fallon acknowledged. “That’s why it’s here for us, why it’s here to serve as the center of command. Fred protected it, Arlys told the world the truth. They held back the dark, and now so will we.”
For two weeks in the bitter cold, war ripped claws through the already torn city. It rampaged through the boroughs like a wild thing. In the third week, the Light for Life forces lost fifty troops in an ambush when they worked to clear a crosstown tunnel. Fallon led in a hundred more to beat back the alliance of DUs and Raiders in the green glow of faerie light.
She emerged into winter sunlight that struck the huge mounds of snow her troops had cleared from the streets and entryways. The crows still circled, smoke still spewed skyward, but the tide was turning. She felt it in her bones, and with it a hope that drove away the fatigue.
She started to mount Laoch, paused at the call of her name. Starr streaked toward her.
“You need to come. It’s Colin.”
“No, he’s not—”
“Alive, but he’s hurt. He’s hurt bad. You need to come.” She who rarely touched, gripped Fallon’s hand. “He’s with Jonah and Hannah. They got him to the mobile, but—”
With her hand vised on Starr’s, Fallon flashed them both.
Colin lay on a gurney, his face bleached white, his eyes glazed, his body trembling. With horror Fallon saw the tourniquet above the elbow of his left arm, and Hannah holding compresses to the stub beneath.
Jonah submerged that arm, wrapped in gauze, sealed in a bag, in a tub of ice.
“The bleeding’s slowing down. You’re going to be all right, Colin,” Hannah assured him. “We’re going to get you back to New Hope. He’s in shock. Starr got him here fast—and the limb, but . . .”
Fallon turned, looked directly into Jonah’s eyes. “Will he live?”
“I don’t know.” Jonah laid a hand on Colin, obviously willing the vision of life and death that had once nearly driven him to take his own. “It’s just not clear, it’s not yes or no the way it usually is.”
“Then it’s not no. Can you reattach his arm?”
“Not here, and . . .” He drew her toward the back of the mobile. He kept his voice low, kept it calm. “We haven’t done anything like this at the clinic. I don’t know if Rachel can or not. She’ll try. Like Hannah said, Starr got him here fast. We’ve cleaned the arm, done the emergency treatment, but this is massive, complicated surgery, Fallon. And we can’t flash him back. The blood loss, the shock. He wouldn’t survive it.”
“Then he stays here. Starr, I need you to get my mother. Get someone who can flash, and get her here. She needs to bring her cauldron, three white candles, carnation petals, bay leaves, fresh earth, blessed water, three bloodstones, a white cloth, and leather. Enough leather to cover his arm right down to over the fingers. Her healing balm, her strongest healing potion. Have you got all that?”
“Yes. It was a sword strike,” she added. “It took his arm, and still he killed the enemy before he fell. I’ll be fast.”
“What are you going to do?” Hannah bathed the cold sweat from Colin’s face. “I cleaned the wound, and Jonah’s protected the viability of the severed limb, but we need an OR, and even then—”
“He’s not going to lose his arm.” After nudging Hannah aside, Fallon leaned over her brother. “Colin, look at me. Hear me, see me. I can give you back your arm, but it has to be your choice. It won’t be the same as it was. Do you understand?”
“No. Son of a bitch!”
“You’ll have to relearn how to use it again,” Fallon persisted. “And it’s going to hurt like hell. Pain’s part of the price. It’s your will, Colin. You have to want it, be willing to go through the pain. You need to be awake and aware. You’re strong. You can do this.”
His teeth chattered, and his eyes swirled with pain. “Can’t they, like, sew it back on?”
“They’re not sure, and we’re not sure how long it would take you to get back to New Hope.” As she spoke, she opened herself to his wound. Pain, searing, even with whatever Hannah had given him to dull it. But clean. She’d done her job well. “But I’m sure. Trust me.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, and before he opened them again, she felt that will inside him, steely, snap strong.
“Maybe you could toss some magick in. Make it like a super arm.”
“Let’s just get you whole again. I need more room. We need to move him outside.”
“Out—” At Fallon’s swift, ferocious glare, Hannah bit back the objection.
She could hear the battle raging, only blocks away from the safety zone in Midtown. North now, Fallon knew, moving slowly, steadily toward the great park. As they set the gurney in what had once been a promenade near the ice rink where during the winter months people had spun and circled, slipped and tripped, Starr flashed back not only with her mother, but Ethan.
Good, she thought, the more family the better.
Lana rushed to Colin. “There’s my boy. Mom’s here. Let me see.”
“We need to cast the circle.” Fallon took the satchel her mother carried. “And fast.”
“I need to see. I might be able to—”
“You can’t.” Brisk to the point of cold, Fallon cut off her mother’s words, the voice that struggled not to shake. “I’ve looked. But we can. The Book of Spells is in me, that knowledge. There’s a chance, but we cast the circle first. Ethan, you’ll help. Set the candles in a triangle at Colin’s head. Light them. Starr, roust some of the troops off rotation. Magick can draw magick. I don’t want any interference.”
“How can we help?” Jonah asked.
“Get your weapons, stand guard. Mom, the circle.”
“All right, all right. You hold on.” As the scarf she’d tossed on snapped in the wind, Lana pressed a kiss to Colin’s brow. And with Fallon and Ethan, cast the protective circle around her oldest son.
“Float the cauldron over the candles,” Fallon told her mother. “And in the cauldron put seven carnation petals, seven bay leaves, one bloodstone.”
Fallon took the white cloth and, pricking her finger with her knife tip, carefully wrote Colin’s name.
“This is my brother, blood of my blood. Know his name.” She wrapped another bloodstone in the cloth, added it to the cauldron. “This is water, blessed by the mother. Know her love. This is earth, given brother to brother.” She nodded to Ethan. “One fistful,” she ordered. “Know his faith.”
She lifted her hands and the wind came in stronger, in circling whirls. “This is air, stirred by the sister. Know my devotion. And now this air lifts the flames on candles white and pure, to offer these elements. Rise, rise, rise, flame and power, rise, rise, rise, a healing tower. Merge water, earth, wind, and fire, rise straight, rise true, rise higher.”
As the flames shot up, lances of light, what was in the cauldron began to bubble and smoke. In it she slid the leather, and the third stone.
She sheathed her knife, drew her sword, one taken from fire, one lifted in faith.
“We are three and family, this healing spell we seal.”
She held out a hand for Ethan’s, and without hesitation he offered it, kept his eyes on hers when she scored his palm so his blood dripped into the cauldron. “Here, in a brother’s blood, is kindness.” She scored Lana’s. “Here, in a mother’s blood, is selfless love.” Then her own. “Here, in a sister’s blood, is faith. We are three. We are family. This spell we seal, this wound to heal.
“Unwrap the wound,” she told her mother. “Coat it with the balm. Then take his right hand, push all you have into him when I say. Ethan,” she continued as she took the arm from the ice bath, “at his shoulders. Hold him down, give him all you have.”
She unwrapped the arm, pushed away the doubt and fear that wanted to creep under the shield of power.
“He’s going into shock again,” Hannah called out. “Let me—”
Fallon merely flicked a hand, shoved Hannah back two steps. Then drew the leather, now slick as skin and shimmering, from the cauldron.
Her eyes, dark, lit with power, met Colin’s. “Your will,” she told him, “your courage. Let them see your power, your heart.”
Holding out her hand, she caught three of Lana’s tears in her palm, let them fall on the wounds as she pressed them together.
“Hold him down. Push!”
When she laid the leather over his arm, the sudden, searing pain ripped a cry out of him. His body arched against it, his eyes went wide and glazed.
“Will it,” Fallon snapped at him. “Want it. Take it. I call upon the power of light,” she shouted as she ruthlessly coated his arm, from fingertip to elbow, with the shimmering, smoking leather. “Restore your warrior for the fight. Knit and join to heal, skin to skin now merge to seal. By the power you granted me, as I will, so mote it be.”
Light flashed from her hands, streaked over his arm.
She heard the crows, ignored them. The lightning that flashed at the circle others deflected. She kept her hands clamped on Colin even as his pain cut through her and the wind snapped with keen teeth.
Then it died, like a switch flipped, and the pain, the terrible burning of it, fell to a pulsing ache. His pulse, she thought, one she felt through his arm.
“Do you see me?” She leaned in close. When he nodded, pale, breathless, she laid a hand on his sweat-slicked face. “I see you, brother. The light in you is mortal and human and stronger than any dark. Give him the healing potion, Mom.”
Weeping, Lana lifted his head, brought the vial to his lips. “Drink now, my baby. My boy.”
“Am I moving my fingers? I can’t tell.”
“You have to will it,” Fallon told him. “Retrain your mind to work with your arm. It’ll take time, and it may not function as easily or as completely as it used to.”
“I’ll make it work.” He stared down, obviously puzzled by the leather that covered him from fingertip to elbow like skin. “Is it like a cast?”
“No.”
He looked at Fallon with eyes going a little goofy from the potion. “I got a leather arm now? Cool.”
“Yeah, cool. Sleep now.” Fallon put him under. “We close the circle, then—”
Lana, eyes still streaming, reached out across her sleeping son to grip her daughter’s hand. “I’ve never seen such power. In all I’ve seen, all I’ve known, I’ve never seen anything like what you were able to do. You were hurting him, hurting yourself, and I tried to stop you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. The lack of faith, even just for that second, could have cost him. It won’t ever happen again. I need to stay with him.”
“We’ll move him into the HQ. You can help him work on getting movement back. He’ll get pissy about it, so better you than me.”
“I’m staying, too,” Ethan said. “I can help with the animals, with Colin.”
They closed the circle, gathered the tools. When Hannah as medical, Starr as guard, helped take him to the HQ, Fallon sat on the ramp of the mobile.
“It’s clear as day now,” Jonah said. “It got clearer and clearer during the spell. Life. I think it depended on you, and Colin, on all of you being able to do what you did, so it got clearer and clearer. Then there’s that.”
At his gesture, she looked at the statue of the god overlooking the ice rink. Where the war and black magicks had turned it into a fanged demon, coated the gold with oily ash, Prometheus shined again.
The gods, Fallon thought, had heard, and answered.
He laid a hand on her shoulder. “You look like you could use a little magick elixir, too.” He went into the mobile, came out with a flask. “Not your mother’s elixir, but it can’t hurt.”
She took it, sipped whiskey, let out a breath.
A golden god, a rink of ice, a pulse in an arm.
Her head hammered with the aftershocks of the spell.
“I need to get word to my father, to Travis that he was hurt, but he’s okay.”
“We’ll do that.” But he sat beside her, put an arm around her shoulders.
Though it didn’t surprise Jonah, it did her when she pressed her face against him and wept.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Colin, being Colin, did get pissy, especially when Fallon refused to let him back into the field of battle. He managed, after two days, to wiggle his fingers, and after a week to make a loose fist.
Colin figured that was good enough. Fallon disagreed.
“It’s not my sword arm anyway,” he argued, stomping around the room so the beads dangling from his warrior’s braid clicked and clacked together. “What’s the BFD?”
Fallon, marking the latest map, nearly regretted that her brother had recovered enough to be on his feet—and hound her.
“You can’t even lift a cup of coffee with your left hand yet.”
“I won’t be drinking coffee. I’m going to die of boredom, and the goddamn war’s going to be over before I’m back in it at this rate.”
“I wish the second part were true.”
He moved, restlessly, wiggling, wiggling, wiggling the leather fingers of his hand. “We’ve taken Queens, Brooklyn, most of lower Manhattan, all of Midtown.”
“We’ve lost fifteen hundred men, and have another three hundred, including you, medically unfit for duty. We’ve yet to be able to advance above what was Fifty-eighth Street on the west side.”
He paced, now working, working, working the fingers of his restored arm into a fist. “We need to take Central Park. It’s their last real stronghold. Once we do, they’re broken here.”
“I’m aware. I’m working on it. Get battle-ready, Colin, because when we’re secure here, I want you to take a thousand troops and root the enemy out of Pennsylvania.”
He stopped pacing, flexing, scowling, turned to stare at her. “The whole state?”
“That’s right. They’re scattered there, but still a presence. Run them to ground. Vivienne’s troops are going into upstate New York, I’m going to have Mick move into Georgia.”
She gestured him over, showing him her plans on the maps—and intrigued him enough he stopped bitching.
She turned when Arlys and Fred came in.
“I didn’t think you were coming until later,” she said to Arlys. “I didn’t know you were coming at all, Fred.”
“I wanted to see. I’ve got friends riding herd on my herd until tomorrow.” Fred slipped a hand into Arlys’s.
“I can’t believe it’s still here. So much of it’s still here. Even after they got word back to us, I didn’t believe it.” Arlys walked to the window, pressed a hand to the glass. “So much gone, but so much here, too.”
“I didn’t want you to come until I felt we’d secured enough, but Mom kept pleading your case. She knows how much it means to you. She knows what both of you did here.”
“Not alone,” Arlys added. “Jim, Carol, Steve. They could have left, but they stayed. God, I wish we knew what happened to them.”
“They got out.” Fred mov
ed up to slip her arm around Arlys’s waist so they stood at the windows, heads tipped toward each other.
“God, I hope so.”
“I just know they did. I just know they found a way.”
Comforted, Arlys drew Fred with her into the newsroom. “When I first started working here, it was a high point of my life. And I was, by God, going to work my way to the anchor desk.”
“You did,” Fred reminded her.
“Not the way I imagined.” She walked to it now, to where she’d sat for that final broadcast.
They’d cleaned it, she thought as she skimmed her fingers over it. But she could still see the blood and gore, still feel the way that blood had rained warm on her face when Bob, poor Bob, had chosen despair and madness and death.
Had that been what had woken her up? she wondered. Had that warm slap of blood reminded her to dig for the courage to do her job?
To tell the truth.
She looked out now, into the eye of the camera. It was still her job.
“I want to broadcast your victory from here, Fallon, from this same desk, in this same newsroom. I want to tell whoever in the world we can reach we’ve reclaimed New York.”
“Maybe Jim and Carol and Steve will hear it.”
With a firm nod, Arlys took Fred’s hand again. “Or T.J. or Noah, or someone who worked in that shop in Hoboken where you left the thank-you note. We can bring Chuck up—he should be part of it, and he can figure out how to make it work.”
“I can help write the copy.” Fred’s wings peeked out to flutter.
“Damn straight. When you’re ready to declare victory, Fallon, I want to report it. You and me and Chuck, Fred. The three of us are going to close that circle. Then we’ll turn this place, and the reporting done from here, over to someone else. Because we’re New Hope now.”
It was, Fallon thought, exactly what she’d hoped to hear. “Mom said you would. You’re earlier than I thought—and like I said, I didn’t know Fred was coming. Will and Theo are going to be here in about an hour. I can have Eddie come in, too.”
Now Fred’s wings fanned out, sparkled. “I can’t wait!”