This Magic Moment

by Susan Squires

  “No. He still limps and talks haltingly.” True. Though he had been recovering even in the time Thomas had been there.

  Morgan’s look of satisfaction made Thomas feel sick. “And that bitch Brina?”

  “She has some small part of her former gift. She healed the welts where Brother Theodosius whipped me.” It didn’t surprise him that Morgan looked disappointed. “But it fatigued her and she said she was glad they weren’t worse or she could not have helped me.”

  “Take off your shirt,” Morgan snapped.

  Thomas calmly pulled his tee shirt over his head and turned around.

  “You still have scars.”

  “Yes. She said she couldn’t erase those.” He turned back to see Morgan’s sly smile.

  “Not very powerful at all, then, is she?”

  “No. Nothing to match you or those in your service.”

  Morgan’s eyes grew hard. “Did you fuck any of the women? Or men for that matter?”

  “What?”

  “You know the word. It’s old English, and I know you read Anglo Saxon. Or maybe the books I let you have didn’t use that particular word. It means ‘have sex.’”

  Now was the hard part. “No, I didn’t.” He managed to look uncertain. “Should I have? I…I’m not sure how to do that.” There. He’d lied. Guile was necessary if he was to win through. Brina had confirmed that. If his core of honor was sullied by lying, then so be it. He only hoped his hesitation would be mistaken for reticence.

  Morgan grinned at him. “Poor baby. I’ll just have to teach you.”

  No revulsion. Not a single hint must show in his face. “I would like that.”

  “We’ll save that little lesson for just the right moment, though.”

  She was talking about the ceremony. She took his arm. He managed not to shudder. “Now, I want to know about the Tremaine powers. They can’t stop me but I don’t want any surprises when I get around to making them pay for the time and effort they’ve cost me.”

  *

  Tammy fought off the fog of sleep just in time to throw up on her floor and not in her bed. Pain surged up from her belly into her head, down to her loins, and wrapped itself around her heart, squeezing.

  God, she’d been poisoned. Blearily, she looked around. How had she gotten here? She didn’t remember falling asleep. She’d been in the conference room…

  Thomas had brought her chocolate and she’d fallen asleep.

  And where was Thomas? She needed him. Right now. She whimpered because another wave of pain hit her and because she didn’t know where he was. Her sense of him was dissolving even as she grasped at it.

  Clutching her belly, she stumbled to the door. She was dressed in her nightgown. The bed wasn’t mussed at all, besides where she’d lain. Thomas had not been there.

  No, no, no. She couldn’t bear to think that. Yet she couldn’t think of anything else.

  She plunged into the hallway at the top of the stairs and staggered down the steps and into the living room. It was early morning. The light streamed in through the long windows on either the side of the front door. There would be someone in the kitchen. There was always someone in the kitchen. But she couldn’t make it there. A snapping inside her made her shriek in agony as she practically fell down the three steps to the living room and onto the couch.

  Thomas was gone. All sense of him had vanished, leaving a hole in her mind and her body that she knew would never be filled. Sobs tore up through her throat.

  “What’s wrong?” Tris lunged in through the front door.

  Kemble strode down the hall opposite the foyer, coming from the business wing.

  “Tammy?” Drew leaned over the balustrade at the top of the stairs and was immediately joined by Mom, wrapping a robe around herself.

  “What’s wrong?” Devin asked as he and Kee came down from the third floor, using the old servant’s stairs in the back of the house. He was dressed only in pajama bottoms.

  Soon, half the family was clustered around her. Tris helped her up to sitting. Mom knelt and took her hand. “Honey, tell us.”

  “Doesn’t have to tell us,” Tris growled. “Where’s Thomas?”

  “I…I don’t know,” Tammy sobbed. They were going to try to console her, and that would be impossible. Thomas had left her.

  Kemble went still, only his eyes flickering from side to side. “Not on the estate,” he said grimly after a moment. Kemble had checked all the security cameras in that blink of his eyes.

  “Our…our connection broke,” Tammy managed to get out.

  “That bastard,” Tris muttered hoarsely.

  “We’ve all been played for fools,” Kemble said, his voice controlled and remote.

  “He intended to go back to her all along,” Lan said bitterly. “Only now he knows exactly how weak we are.”

  “You mean you think he was a spy?” Greta was frowning.

  “What else would he be? He didn’t just leave his Destiny for kicks, with as much pain as that means.” Tris’s expression said he remembered exactly how much pain he’d been in when he and Maggie were separated.

  “What I want to know is how the hell he got out.” Kemble opened up the channel to the security room without even using a device and turned away. “Edwards, did you let out Tammy’s young man last night?”

  Tammy sat up. The pain was passing.

  “You feeling better, honey?” her Mom asked.

  She nodded.

  “That’s because he’s out of range. Probably back in Morgan’s lair.” Tris put all his disgust into his growl.

  “You’ve been out like a light since yesterday afternoon.” Her mother smoothed her hair away from her forehead.

  “I thought some pills were missing from my sleep-aid,” Drew said faintly, frowning in thought.

  “He drugged her.” Kemble said it like he was pronouncing a death sentence. “So he could escape without her illness alerting us. And Edwards let him out the gate. Says he thought he was just a visitor. Thomas told Edwards some ‘friends’ were coming to pick him up and take him to the airport. The security feeds showed nothing. A car drove by, he walked out.”

  “No, no,” Tammy murmured. He’d drugged her and left her and he’d planned it.

  Michael stumbled in, running his hands through his hair. “I got a dose too.”

  Oh, this was bad.

  “So you couldn’t Find him,” Kee said, outrage in her voice.

  “Thomas wouldn’t go back to her. He…he’s my Destiny.”

  Michael put his arms around Drew. “We know you’re his Destiny, Tammy. But we don’t know that you raised his powers. Mine were first raised by Alice, before I ever found Drew. He could have had them raised by someone else.”

  “Someone like Morgan,” Kemble said, into a silence.

  Tammy didn’t want to believe Thomas came here to spy on the family, or drugged her, or had his powers raised by anyone but her, let alone Morgan. But she also didn’t want to believe he could have left her. And he had definitely left her.

  Still, she knew him. She knew him like she’d known no one else. And he wasn’t like that. They had shared souls. Hadn’t they?

  “What do you think, Senior?” Kemble asked. Tammy hadn’t seen Daddy join the group. Now she realized he was standing just outside the circle, frowning.

  “I think we should ask Brina.”

  Mom turned up her face to Daddy. Then she stood and looked out toward the kitchen for a moment before she spoke. “He came and asked me to throw the cards for him yesterday.”

  Tammy saw eyes widen around the cluster of family. Thomas had been unsure. Tammy clung to that. He must care for her and her family at least a little to need confirmation of his task. “Well, what did the cards say?” she prompted.

  “The first card he chose was Strength. That indicates courage and patience as well as physical strength.”

  “You can use courage and patience for evil,” Kee said dryly.

  “True. But his next card was th
e Hanged Man.”

  Tammy felt her stomach drop.

  “Not literally hanged, dear. It means self-sacrifice.”

  “Hmmmm,” Daddy said. Tammy looked around and saw them all thinking.

  “Then he drew the Seven of Swords. Guile will bring success.”

  “Well!” Kee threw up her hands. “There you have it. He was sure practicing guile on us.”

  “Maybe,” Daddy said, his voice carefully neutral.

  But Tammy was starting to feel sure. It wasn’t a good feeling, but at least she didn’t believe Thomas had betrayed her. Exactly.

  Mom took a breath. “And the final card was Judgment. You will be judged based on what you are and have done, without condemnation, but also without mercy.”

  Tammy didn’t like the sound of that. It could mean that the family wouldn’t condemn him, but with what she thought he had done, it could also mean that Morgan would have no mercy.

  “Anything else?” Kemble asked.

  “No. That was the last card he drew. He said it had been helpful, and thanked me. He looked…resigned.” Mom was not telling them what that Judgment card could mean.

  “Well, it’s obvious we’ve been played,” Kemble said. “My only consolation is that he might get what he deserves for hurting Tamsen.”

  “He isn’t like that,” Tammy said, standing and trembling only a little. “You don’t know him like I do. And don’t you dare look at me like you pity me. He didn’t betray me, or us. I know it.”

  Daddy made his way to the front of the circle. “Shhh, honey. Hold on for a minute.” Yeah, she’d been yelling there. He turned to Mom. “Brina, you told us what cards he chose, but you didn’t say what you thought they revealed.”

  Tammy watched her mother’s turquoise eyes, so like her own, fill. “I don’t know if I still have any emotional intelligence left or not, but for what it’s worth, I think he’s an innocent boy with a good and true core, though how he got one with his loveless upbringing I’m not sure. I think he’s courageous and I think he came to me because he was going to embark on a precarious and dangerous course that would require guile, something he’s not used before. I think he was appalled at what he saw of Morgan through you, Tammy, and he knew he couldn’t serve her. He also knew he was no longer a virgin, which was the reason she wanted him for the ceremony. He wouldn’t have lost his virginity if he still served Morgan.”

  Tammy felt how Mom’s opinion of Thomas resonated with the rest of them. She had always had such a canny, intuitive grasp of character she just couldn’t be wrong about him. And that part hadn’t faded just because Mom’s power had. That was just who she was. Tammy knew in her heart that Mom wasn’t wrong now.

  “He came to me and asked me about the ceremony,” Kemble interjected, looking uncertain now. “Wanted to know if virgin blood was required for it to work. And of course there’s no certainty of that. It might work with only, uh, blood sacrifice. So then he asked what would happen if the moment the Pentacle formed passed without the ceremony.”

  “By the time he came to me,” Mom continued, “he’d already made up his mind. The Strength card showed that. The Seven of Swords confirmed his tactics, and he accepted that the Judgment card would be his lot. What his plans are I don’t know.”

  Kemble frowned. “He’ll try to stop the ceremony with fire. That’s his only weapon.”

  Drew looked up at Michael with her hollow eyes and wan visage, and he nodded at her. “I’d agree, for whatever it’s worth,” she said, her voice a shell of itself.

  That was bad. Tammy had come to dread any expression of Drew’s power, especially these days. They all waited for Drew.

  She gathered herself. “Before…well, just—in previous visions, I saw Thomas. He was lying on a slab of stone. He was bleeding. Morgan held the Sword. Fire was everywhere.”

  Tammy felt herself go still, and then everything broke inside her all over again. “Why didn’t you tell me this?” she said, furious. “We could have watched over him every minute so he didn’t go. You…you withheld vital information.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered.” Michael always defended Drew. “He knew Morgan would deduce where he was by the, uh, conversation she had with Jason. If he didn’t come out to her, she’d have gotten him out another way, which might not have been pretty.”

  “So he drugged Tammy so she couldn’t try to stop him and Michael in case he was missed and went to the front gate to wait for them.” Daddy sighed. “He was trying to save us.”

  Tammy felt a certainty growing in her, of a kind she’d never felt before. “We can’t let him do this, Daddy. He won’t tell her he’s not a virgin and she’ll sacrifice him in the ceremony. She’ll kill him unless we stop her.”

  Drew looked like she was strangling. “I saw you bleeding too, Tammy.”

  “And then you started seeing nothing for us at all, Drew,” Mom said quietly. “Only blackness. As though none of us had a future.”

  Tammy felt her stomach fall down into her feet. Others around her were equally shocked.

  Drew looked betrayed. “You said not to tell them.”

  Mom nodded slowly. “I was wrong. We all must know what we’re getting into.”

  Tammy found her voice before any of the others. That was a first. “Drew saw him bleeding, but she didn’t see him dead. You’re not sure I was dead either, right?”

  Drew shook her head: a tiny, frightened move. “But the blackness… It’s red and black and it’s like a gaping hole. All my visions have come true…”

  “But sometimes you don’t know what they mean until they do. Maybe that’s true with this black stuff.” She gathered herself. “But does it even really make a difference if that’s what happens? We might die, but we might save the world from Morgan anyway. And we have to try, or who are we?” She looked around at them, challenging, and saw them, one by one, begin to settle back in to what they must do, some grim, some frightened.

  “You know the old saying,” Greta said in a small voice. “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. I know I’m the newest member of the family, but…”

  “No, you aren’t,” Tammy interrupted. “Thomas is.” She let that hang out there. Whether it was official by marriage or not, Thomas was her Destiny and they all knew it.

  “Even if we wanted to hit the compound, we still don’t know where the God-damned thing is,” Kemble said, running his hands through his hair and making a mess of it, which he never did. But Tammy had never been so relieved to hear his complaint. They were going to do this thing. She could see it in the increasingly resolute expressions around her.

  “But we will,” Jane said, in that calm way she had. “Because Thomas is there and Michael can Find him.”

  Michael shook his head, impatiently. “But I can’t. Their damned Cloaker has got the whole compound shut down.” He had never sounded so frustrated. “I can’t get past the Cloak.”

  “But I can.” Tammy wasn’t giving up on Thomas that easily. “I see into the Compound through Morgan’s raven. I’ve been doing it for days now.”

  Michael went still and stared at Tammy.

  “And if you touch me, you can see in as well,” she prodded.

  “So you think….”

  “I think if Michael touches me, he’ll be under the Cloak.”

  Michael gave a brusque nod.

  Tammy sat slowly on the couch, feeling right under her breastbone for the center of her power. There were murmurs around her of agreement and support. “Keep quiet, folks. I’ve had trouble keeping in the scene for very long recently,” she said.

  Michael, standing behind the couch, put his hands on her shoulders, ready to use his own power to Find if Tammy’s Sight allowed it. Tammy took a long slow breath. She had to stay in this scene long enough for Michael to do his work. It didn’t matter if she felt eviscerated by the hole Thomas had left in her. It didn’t matter if she was scared or unsure of herself, or if she was afraid of Drew’s visions. The family was
depending on her. She reached for the power and felt it surge up through her lungs into her throat and up into her head, out through her eyes. She knew her eyes would be turning opaque and white. She heard several gasps around her from those who hadn’t seen it, but she didn’t care. She reached for Edgar.

  Suddenly she was in the kind of control room she had seen before. The ultraviolet of a pad of paper on a clipboard was blinding purple-white. The raven seemed to be in his usual perch on Morgan’s shoulder. The family’s nemesis was sitting, looking up at a kid with greasy hair and lots of silver rings pierced in his face. The silver made them shiny blue-white too. “He can sleep another hour or two, no more.” Morgan barked to the kid. “It will take hours to get him fully prepared for tonight’s ceremony. Which is your responsibility, Duncan.”

  Tammy felt the vision waiver. She couldn’t get kicked out now. She struggled to focus.

  The kid, swallowed, nervous. “Uh, and what would that entail?” His lips curved in a sneer. Who would dare to sneer at Morgan? But that seemed to be the kid’s perpetual expression.

  The raven peered at the skinny kid as Morgan talked. “An emetic, enemas, then bathing. He must be clean inside and out. And be sure to oil his body.”

  “I am not oiling his body,” Duncan said, startled out of his sneer.

  “You what?” Morgan asked softly.

  “I mean, I’m not a…”

  Tammy felt another surge of power inside her. Michael! Michael was trying to Find and his power was adding to her own. She felt like she could stay focused in Edgar forever.

  “Oh, very well,” Morgan snapped. Then her voice got sly. “He can oil himself. In the gym showers where I can watch.”

  Duncan heaved a sigh of relief. “Sure thing,” he said. He started to turn. A cat stalked in through the open door. “Hey, shoo. Get out of here,” Duncan said, glancing back to Edgar. The cat scooted out the door, his dignity shaken. “Rhiannon’s damned cat.”

  Tammy saw a flap of the raven’s wings from the corner of her eyes and felt like she was lunging for Duncan. The raven gave a piercing caw. Duncan loomed huge in her vision and all she could see was defending forearms and shiny rings.