by Olivie Blake
“And that’s a good thing?”
“It’s like meditation.” Callum closed his eyes, sinking lower in the chair. He inhaled deeply, and then, slowly, opened them. “Your vibes,” he drawled facetiously, “are absolutely resplendent.”
Tristan rolled his eyes. “Want a drink?” he said. “Could use one.”
Callum rose to his feet with a nod. “What are we celebrating?”
“Our fragile mortality,” Tristan said. “The inevitability that we will descend into chaos and dust.”
“Grim,” Callum offered appreciatively, closing a hand around Tristan’s shoulder. “Try not to tell Rhodes that or she’ll start decaying all over the place.”
Because he could not resist, Tristan asked, “What if she’s tougher than you think she is?”
Callum shrugged, dismissive.
“I’m just curious,” Tristan clarified, “whether that would please you or send you into a spiral of existential despair.”
“Me? I never despair,” said Callum. “I am only ever patently unsurprised.”
Not for the first time, Tristan considered how the ability to estimate people to the precise degree of what they were must be a dangerous quality to have. The gift of understanding a person’s reality, both their lightness and darkness, without the flaws of perception to blur their edges or lend meaning to their existence was… unsettling.
A blessing, or a curse.
“And if I disappoint you?” Tristan prompted.
“You disappoint me all the time, Caine. It’s why I’m so very fond of you,” Callum mused, beckoning Tristan toward the library and its finer bottles of vintage scotch.
NICO
It stood to reason, given Eilif’s appearance in his bathroom sink, that the wards had a hole of some kind. Not that magic was so easily simplified to concrete matters of holes or solidity or otherwise, but for all intents and purposes, the wards intended to keep people out of the Society must have been faulty on the basis of precisely that: they were intended for people.
The library’s archives, at least, had seen fit to provide Nico with something of a primer on creatures and their respective magics, for which he had required Reina’s knowledge of runes and antiquated linguistics to fully grasp. There had been no recent treatises on the subject, owing first to hunting and then to the (not-dissimilar) prospect of academic study that was hardly distinct from captivity. The practice of “conservation” where it came to magical species had become so mistrusted among the creatures themselves that, according to Gideon, most had either disappeared or chosen to align themselves—as his mother had—with fairly dubious magical sources.
“My father is either dead or hiding,” Gideon had explained to Nico once, “not that it matters which, as I don’t expect to ever hear from him. I’m quite sure I have siblings all over the world, belonging to any variety of species. Doubtless he acknowledges none.”
Gideon had said it in a factual manner at the time, wholly unemotional about the prospect, and Nico hadn’t bothered to question him any further. Gideon already had plenty of psychological trauma without adding a father fixation to the mix, so if anything, the absence of Gideon’s father was probably a blessing.
Nico’s single concern was, as always, keeping Gideon’s mother out. Once the Society’s perimeter was secured, he could return his attention to the study of Gideon’s remaining fractures without fearing he’d become responsible for a massive security breach.
Despite trusting Reina to accurately translate runes for him as he’d requested, Nico had hoped not to have to explain the reasons for his little foray into rare extracurricular study. True to form, Reina required little explanation.
“As far as I can tell, magic is magic,” she said, hardly looking up from where she scanned the page in the reading room. She sat with her legs curled under herself on the chair, her entire frame defensively enveloping the book as if she feared someone might suddenly snatch it from her hand. “Most creatures’ genetics are no different from a human’s than an ape’s. Just a matter of evolutionary distinctions, that’s all.”
“Mutations?”
She glanced up, eyes slightly narrowed. “Genetic, you mean?”
Nico bristled at the implication that he might have meant aberrations. “Of course,” he said, perhaps more passionately than necessary.
“No need to be brutish,” she remarked, expressionless. Then she returned her attention to the page. “The difference in magical ability appears to lie in the customary form of usage,” she said, eyes roving over the page with only the slightest break in motion; a sidelong glance to what Nico guessed was a back-talking plant somewhere in the corridor. “That’s true,” she conceded grumpily, presumably to the plant, though she slid her attention upward to fix Nico with a studious look of contemplation.
“It’s smaller,” she said.
He frowned. “What is?”
“The—” She paused, cursing quietly under her breath, or so he assumed. “Output,” she eventually produced from somewhere in her multilingual lexicon. “Usage, power, whatever the word is. Creatures produce less, or rather, waste less.”
“Waste?”
“Ask Tristan,” she said.
“Ask Tristan what?”
Nico spun at the sound of Libby’s voice to find her lingering in the doorway, hesitantly half-in, half-out.
“Nothing,” said Nico, at the same moment Reina said, “How much magic humans produce.”
“Humans,” Libby echoed, flitting inside with a flare of interest. “As opposed to what?”
“Nothing,” Nico repeated, more emphatically this time as Reina returned her attention to the book, muttering an unblinking, “Creatures.”
Libby turned to look at Nico, expectant. “Creatures, Varona, really?”
Her brow was arched beneath her mass of fringe, which he positively loathed. It was one thing for her to be nosy, and another thing entirely for her to regard him with so much palpable doubt.
Just what did she expect him of bollocking up this time?
“I wanted to be certain of something,” he supplied evasively, with the tone of blistering impatience he knew she would find repellant. There was always a chance she’d leave if he pestered her enough.
“Okay, and what does Tristan have to do with it?”
Evidently her curiosity had been all too successfully piqued.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Nico retorted, though much to his dismay, that was enough to make Reina finally remember to explain herself.
“Tristan can see magic being used,” she said from behind her curtain of black hair.
“How do you know that?” asked Libby, which to Nico’s ear sounded unnecessarily accusing, as if she resentfully suspected Reina and Tristan of having some sort of weekly brunch wherein they discussed their private lives and secret wishes.
“Observation,” Reina replied, which Nico could have told Libby was the obvious answer. Reina spoke little and saw much, though what Nico liked most about her was that she considered most of what she viewed to be substantially unimportant, and therefore not worth discussion.
Unlike Libby, who felt precisely the opposite.
“Tristan,” Reina continued, “can see magic in use. As I was explaining,” she said, cutting a demonstrative glance to Nico to indicate a return to her previous subject, “creatures have a more refined use of their own magic. They channel it better, more efficiently. It’s—” Another pause for the lexicon. “Thinner. Narrow. Spun like thread, not like—” Another pause. “Fumes.”
“I suppose Tristan has used the word ‘leak’ to describe magic before,” Libby murmured thoughtfully to herself. “Though we could probably ask him to explain it more fully.”
The idea of asking Tristan Caine for anything that was not a scowl or muttered clip of sarcasm was enough to sever what remained of Nico’s limited patience.
“No,” he snapped, and would certainly have summoned the book from Reina’s grasp and stormed out if
not for the way she shielded it with her entire body. “This isn’t about you, Rhodes.”
She bristled. “What’s it about, then?”
“Nothing. Certainly nothing I need you for.”
Libby’s eyes narrowed, and Reina curled more determinedly around the book, tacitly assuring them both that she had no interest in what would follow and would certainly be of no help.
Nico, who had fought often enough with Libby Rhodes to know when a larger explosion was impending, abandoned the matter of the book and spun to take the stairs, irritated. He had done well enough for himself without a library’s help before. He would simply see to the matter of the wards without further discussion.
Or not. Behind him, Libby’s unshakable footsteps were dogged and crisp.
“Varona, if you’re planning to do something stupid—”
“First of all,” Nico said, spinning curtly to address her as she stumbled into his back, “if I were to elect to do something stupid, I would not require your opinion on the matter. Secondly—”
“You can’t just run around playing with things unnecessarily just because you’re bored,” Libby retorted, sounding matronly and exhausted. As if she were his mother or his keeper, which she resolutely was not. “What if you’re needed for something?”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Something.” She glared at him, exasperated. “Perhaps it stands to reason, Varona, that you shouldn’t do stupid things simply because they’re stupid. Or does that somehow not compute?”
“If I’m bored, you’re certainly bored,” Nico offered in retaliatory accusation. “Just because you won’t admit it doesn’t make it any less true. And following me around to see what I do wrong gives you a bit of a thrill, doesn’t it?”
“I,” Libby replied hotly, “am not following you around. I’m putting myself to good use. I’m using the research we’re learning and applying it where I can, which is precisely what you should be doing.”
“Oh, truly? How magnificent for you. How scholarly you are,” Nico gushed in plaintive mockery, reaching out to pet her head. “That’s a good girl, Rhodes—”
She swatted his hand away, the air around them crackling with the sparks of her intemperance. “Just tell me what you’re up to, Varona. We could go about it faster if you just asked me for—”
“For what? For help?”
She fell silent.
“Would you have asked me for help, Rhodes?” Nico countered, aware how thinly skeptical his voice sounded. “We aren’t different people now just because we’ve come to a single agreement. Or have you forgotten we’re still competing?”
He regretted it the moment he said it, as it wasn’t what he meant. He hardly needed to make an enemy of Libby, and certainly did not aspire to waste time on any rivalries beyond what was necessary for initiation. He did, however, need her to stay out of his private business, and in this case, he very much did not want to hear the inevitable lecture on how he’d inadvertently allowed a misbehaving mermaid into the house. He doubted it would be brief, and he knew it would be followed extensively with questions, none of which he planned to answer.
“So that’s your idea of an alliance, then.” Libby’s voice was flat with anger.
No, not anger. Something more bitter, less malicious than that.
Brittle sadness.
“Let’s not pretend this is something it isn’t,” Nico said, because the damage had already been done, and it wasn’t as if she’d ever been known to forgive him. “We’re not friends, Rhodes. We never have been, we never will be—and,” he added, giving in to a burst of frustration that mixed unrelentingly with guilt, “since I can’t simply ask you to leave me alone—”
She spun away, the last glimpse of her expression one of hollow disappointment. Nico watched her dismount the stairs, taking a sharp turn to disappear from sight as a little echo of Gideon suddenly tutted softly in his head: Are you being nice to Rhodes?
No, of course not. Because there wasn’t a person in the world who could make him feel less adequate simply by existing, and besides. He had wards to fix.
Nico slid irascibly up the remainder of the stairs, taking a turn at the gallery in the opposite direction of the painted room and bedrooms. He would need privacy to work uninterrupted, which meant the ground floor was not an option, and upstairs contained plenty of unnecessary stages for empty grandeur where no one ever went. He closed himself into one of the gilded drawing rooms (it had long ago stopped being a place for aristocratic dances or whatever purpose the British required rooms to draw) and set himself to the task of mindful pacing, once again engaging the twitchy need for motion he habitually found expelling from his limbs.
Ultimately the wards were gridlike, ordered, and therefore easily surveyed for something out of place, which at first glance was nothing. The six of them had designed the structure of the security system in a spherical globe, within which a tightly woven fabric of magical defenses cloaked the Society and its archives. Physical entry would be easily repelled by the shell of altered forces surrounding the house, while intangible magical entry was readily sensed by the internal system of woven, fluid sentience.
How, then, had Eilif managed to slip them in order to wind up in his sink?
Probably best to check the pipes.
Nico closed his eyes with a grimace and examined the house’s plumbing, feeling at the edges for the warps of magic he recognized as his own, or possibly Libby’s. In terms of magical fingerprints, their signatures were almost identical; a consequence of similar training, perhaps. Nico felt another bristle of guilt or irritation or allergies and shrugged it away, trying to focus more, or possibly less. Intuitively it didn’t matter which specific element of magic belonged to him. Libby’s or his own, it would respond just as obediently, mastered by the skill regardless of the hand that cast it.
Sure enough, upon closer inspection there were numerous bubbles and blemishes, little bastardizations of security from what Nico could feel around the pipes and then, upon further scrutiny, between the layers of insulation in the walls. Not enough to prevent a person from emerging corporeally through the cracks—compression was a difficult task, requiring enough energy to set off the house’s internal sensory wards before any conceivable success of entry—but for Eilif, or for some other creature attempting entry? Possibly, if what Reina said about refinement of power was true. It wasn’t as if air ducts or other methods of entry had never been neglected before, and in this case, Nico could feel the way the house’s infrastructure strained beneath their wards, corroded by magic and hard water and whatever else eroded metal over time. He wasn’t much of a mechanic, but perhaps that was precisely the problem. The medeians elected for the Society were academicians, not tradesmen, and they certainly weren’t chosen for their efficiency at knowing when an old house required maintenance. Sentient though it may have been at times, it was still a physical structure, and Nico’s element was physicality. Perhaps this was always meant to be his (or Libby’s) responsibility to maintain.
Magic was no different from rot, corrosion, temperature change, overuse. Contractions and expansions and chipping and peeling and movements of time and space. Funny how laughably simple everything was in the end, even when it belonged to the immeasurable, or the invaluable. Nico would simply have to repair the areas where the wards were weakened, reinforcing them with custom bandages where they may have waned and warped.
Whether his remedies would hold would be a matter of adhesion, which was… slightly difficult, but hardly impossible. Nico would simply bend back into shape what he could and then cover up what he could not.
Distantly Nico was aware he was considering something Gideon would deem “irresponsible”—or possibly it was Libby calling it that, and Gideon was standing somewhere over her shoulder in Nico’s head, grimacing in agreement. Max would not care either way, which Nico foggily pieced together was something he positively adored about Reina. He could go and grab her now, he thought, considering tha
t the extra burst of energy he seemed to consensually borrow from her might be wise to have at present, but at the disastrous implication he might have been behaving unwisely (“Something stupid,” Libby irked snottily in his head) he promptly nudged the idea away, flicking it aside with a twitch of dismissal.
So what if he overexerted himself, just this once? His power was renewable, easily replenished. He would be sore for a night or three and then the discomfort would pass, and no one would have to know the mistake he’d made initially by overlooking it. If Libby lorded it over him that he was more tired than usual, so be it. It wasn’t as if he was much use in the realm of time, anyway. He had no interest in fountains, youthful or otherwise.
The bristle of recalling his current uselessness was enough to secure Nico’s decision. He disliked the anxiety of listlessness, which was as constant to him as Libby’s unrelenting undercurrent of fear. Fear of what? Failure, probably. She was the sort of perfectionist who was so desperately frightened of being any degree of inadequate that, on occasion, the effort of trying at all was enough to paralyze her with doubt. Nico, meanwhile, never considered failure an option, and whether that was ultimately to his detriment, at least it did not restrain him.
If Libby made the mistake of thinking herself too small, then Nico would gladly consider himself too vast by contrast. If anything, the opportunity to swell beyond the ceiling of his existing powers ignited him. Why not reach further, for things beyond the limits of his current grasp? Even when the options were to reach the sun or collide flaming with the sea, safety was a uselessness Nico de Varona couldn’t abide.
So he started with the easiest tasks: unraveling clusters that had formed around the little gapings of the house. Magic was then thinner at the points of disentanglement, so he reinforced them with his own, sealing them until power flowed smoothly instead of being sucked up into little vacuums of inefficiency. It was a mix of push and pull, easing the entropy of decay into orderly avenues of traffic. The house itself resisted, straining a little, and sweat dripped in thin rivulets down the notches of Nico’s spine. His neck ached a little from a muscular knot he’d hardly noticed before, but which throbbed now with discomfort and strain. Evidence, he surmised belatedly, of his weeks of physical misuse while working with space. It wouldn’t be the first time he would be instructed (or berated) to stretch.