by Jessica Gunn
My stomach dropped, seeing her there, and my mouth ran dry. Not the first instinct I’d expected to have at seeing Kinder again. She’d caused so much destruction. I should be pissed. I should have attacked by now. But here I stood, unmoving.
“Good evening, Ben,” she said coolly.
I gestured to her hands. “We have enough problems with fire-elementals burning our furniture down. Could you cut it out?”
Kinder lifted her hands, inspecting them. “My apologies. Sometimes my magik gets away from me.”
“I somehow doubt that.” I took a step back toward the living room. Would I be able to call to the others for help before she attacked me? Maybe even just a teleportante to put space between us would be enough.
She smirked. “I am not here to hurt you.”
“Then what do you want? Because I ought to kill you right here and never look back. You killed over a dozen Hunters.”
Laughing, she leaned back against one of the counters. “You think I care? The Fire Circle has killed enough for all of us to go on a spree every now and again and have it be completely normal.”
“What do you want?” I asked again. Lightning crackled around my fingertips, jumping between them and the nearest wall.
Kinder didn’t so much as look mildly annoyed by my magik. “I wanted to talk to you about your son, Riley.”
“He’s gone,” I spat. “You’re too late. Because you couldn’t or wouldn’t finish Giyano off when he attacked you, he’s stolen my son. Lady Azar likely has him now.”
Kinder shrugged, her dark, almost-black eyes unreadable. “I am not afraid of my daughter. I can get him back to you if you can’t.”
“Why would you care? Last I checked, you were all for blowing Cianza Boston. Letting Lady Azar take Cianza Alzan only gets rid of a step for you.” When Alzan went, so too would every plane in existence.
“The last thing I want is for my daughter to destroy us all. Cianza Boston is a special case. I do not care about the collateral damage standing between me and my revenge on the Fire Circle. But to attack a cianza the size of the one at Alzan?” She shook her head. “My daughter does not know what she thinks she does. She’s not prepared for the consequences.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from asking what those consequences were. It seemed pretty obvious to me: the end of the world. “Get out of our house.”
“You don’t want me to help you with your son’s magik?”
I leveled her with a glare, a sudden source of courage overriding the fear that Kinder, Betrayer of Darkness, stood before me while the rest of my team was nowhere nearby. “I don’t want or need help from demons.”
Kinder’s nostrils flared. “You do not have a choice. Your son’s magik will eat him alive if he doesn’t train. My daughter aside, there are plenty of people who’d love to get their hands on him. Bounty hunters from Landshaft. Aloysius. My dear old Fire Circle. By binding his magik, you keep him lame.”
My fists curled and I surged forward, stopping just short of Kinder. “I told you it doesn’t fucking matter! Lady Azar has Riley.”
“Then go save him again,” she suggested in monotone. “I’m the only one who can train him, to teach him how to keep himself safe. One day you’ll see that.”
I roared, lunging for Kinder. “I don’t need help from a demon regarding how to raise my son!”
I tackled her to the ground, but she rolled and landed on top of me. It was the only attack I’d get in, evident by the barrage of shots she took at my face, each one becoming hotter and hotter, as if her hand w on fire.
Lightning in my hands met each of her blows, but still she didn’t budge.
“What the?” someone—Krystin, I realized—asked as she rushed into the kitchen. “Ben!”
Kinder spun on Krystin, who froze, staring. “Come now, Krystin. Has the Fire Circle shown you their true colors yet?”
Krystin’s eyes narrowed. She launched a small fireball at Kinder, although it was barely enough to warrant dodging. It distracted Kinder well enough that I was able to wiggle out from beneath her. I tossed a strike of lightning Kinder’s way. She waved her hand through the air, summoning fire to misdirect the strike somehow. Instead, Kinder grew her own fireball and tossed it at Krystin, a trail of flames following behind her hand.
Krystin’s eyes went wide, but she lifted her hands to catch it. She did, then sent the fire flying back at Kinder.
Kinder laughed as she made the flames dissipate somehow. “Funny how much you learn in an hour with a real master, isn’t it, Krystin? Did Giyano teach you that?”
“Go to hell,” Krystin growled.
“Not until I help you save us all,” Kinder said. And although the words sounded nice, she turned back to me and launched a new wave of fire, huge and blue this time, so hot that it warped the air around it in a mirage.
I scrambled out of the way, but when Kinder whipped around with the new attack, there was zero chance in hell I’d be able to dodge it. The massive storm of fire raged toward me. All I could do was throw up my arms to cover my face and pray that Kinder needed me somehow—for Riley, maybe, or something else. Anything that’d keep me alive. But she hated Fire Circle Hunters, and I knew that’d override everything else.
“No, you don’t!” Krystin shouted as an immense wave of heat closed in on my face.
Then froze.
“Move, Ben,” Krystin said through gritted teeth. “I can’t hold it off for long.”
I opened my eyes and dropped my arms. Krystin stood beside me, clasped fists holding the wave of fire at bay. I sidestepped it and swung around, but Kinder appeared next to me.
“Without me, your son will lose himself to the Power,” she said.
“Get the hell away from me!” I threw a punch at her jaw, following it up with another shot, but neither connected.
Krystin let the fireball go and it slammed into the kitchen counter, igniting the cabinets. The fire alarm above us wailed as smoke spiraled to the ceiling.
Rachel stopped in the doorway, Nate and Shawn right behind her. She turned on the kitchen sink’s faucet and gathered water into her hands. Rachel shot tendrils of it toward the flames, dousing them.
A punch knocked me sideways, my vision spinning as darkness danced on the horizon. I stayed steady enough to watch Kinder and Krystin trade blows, to watch Kinder grab on to Krystin. For Krystin to freeze, her eyes flashing white.
A vision.
And then Kinder disappeared and the world went dark.
Chapter 18
KRYSTIN
I was stunned, even after Kinder disappeared. The smell of burnt wood from the cabinets filled my nostrils as I stood there, frozen except for my shaking hands.
What the Fire Circle had done to Kinder… what she’d shown me…
No wonder she wanted to burn all of Boston to the ground.
“Krystin?” Ben asked, his voice small. “Are you okay? What’d she do to you?”
“I didn’t realize you cared anymore.” I winced at my own words but kept still. He’d almost died back there, and then where would Riley have been? I wasn’t sure what Kinder planned to do regarding training Riley, but that she hadn’t gone into Lady Azar’s lair and stolen him from her daughter already spoke volumes.
Ben rolled his eyes and stepped toward me on cautious feet. “What happened?”
The chains around her wrists. Kinder’s constant state of fear. I shook my head and inhaled deeply. It was just a vision. It didn’t actually happen.
Not to me anyway. But Kinder had lived through it.
“She showed me what the Fire Circle put her through,” I said. “Before Aloysius made her immortal.”
The fire alarm still blared above us, so if Ben responded, his quiet words were swallowed by the noise. I doubted he’d understand anyway. We’d both been jerked around by the Fire Circle, but in very different ways. Ways I was beginning to realize that only Kinder understood. Kinder and me and Shawn.
I glanced over at Shaw
n and found him already watching me carefully. He lifted an eyebrow in question. I shook my head. Later.
“So Kinder breaks in right as Giyano’s hunting humans in Boston again?” Rachel asked. “Seems convenient.”
“It’s not Giyano, I told you that.” I looked to Ben. “You must know that now. Even Kinder has Riley’s best interests in mind. Zanka and Lady Azar, they’re the ones who want to use him. To frame Giyano. To attack us and Sandra.”
He shook his head, his fists white-knuckling. “They’re all demons and they will all die. We need to clean up the kitchen as best we can before the twins return tomorrow. They can’t know something happened here.”
Nate pointed to the burnt cabinets behind Ben’s shoulder. “I think they’re going to notice.”
“Tell them I tried cooking,” Ben said, totally serious. Not even Rachel cracked a smile. “Whatever we have to do to hide the fact that Kinder was here. It won’t look good for Krystin or us.”
“There you go pretending you care again,” I muttered. It’d get him imprisoned too.
Ben whipped around at me. “Of course I care, Krystin. You’re a member of this team. I trusted you. And on the very off chance that we’re all incredibly wrong about this, I still want to trust you. Now, help us clean up this mess before the twins return.”
I gulped, watching as the others began picking up the remnants of Kinder’s attack. She’d come here with a purpose, probably to help us regain Riley from Lady Azar.
I didn’t believe her motives were entirely selfless. But that Ben seemed to want me still on this team despite everything… I couldn’t let him down. Except what Kinder had shown me had seared into my mind. And the images of her torture, her pain, would not be easy to forget.
I had to tell Shawn.
I had to get us the hell out of the Fire Circle.
I caught up to Shawn as he retreated up to his room. Day or night—none of that seemed to matter anymore. We slept when we could, and the purple bags under his eyes said he hadn’t been sleeping enough, period.
It made me almost feel bad for adding more to his plate.
“Hey,” I said as he started to shut his door. He’d taken the last free room at the house when he’d joined the team, right at the start of the hallway and across from the bathroom. It’d be private enough for what I wanted to say to him. “Can I have a minute?”
He peered at me through the crack in his door for a moment, then nodded and let me in. I closed the door behind me.
“Are you here to tell me what really happened?”
I nodded. “We need to leave the Fire Circle before they imprison us, team or not.”
His eyes narrowed. “Why?”
I ran a hand through my hair, glancing at the walls. What were the odds the twins had placed some sort of bugging ward on every wall in our house? “Because the Fire Circle didn’t hunt Kinder down like other individuals with the Power.”
“So?”
“She showed me. Don’t you get it? She forced a vision into me, like she did at the Hydron operation three months ago. Except this time, she didn’t hold back.”
He considered me with a weary look but ultimately sat on the bed and gestured me over anyway. “I get your empathy for Giyano. But you can’t ask me to care about Kinder, the same woman who nearly killed you, who did kill dozens of Hunters, and who will probably blow all of Boston by tilting the cianza sometime soon.”
“No, she’s a monster,” I said. “But I get why she’s doing it, and why she’s so concerned about making sure you and I both know to watch ourselves around the Fire Circle.”
He shook his head. “I thought it was Jaffrin we didn’t trust, not the Circle as a whole.”
“I don’t trust anyone.”
“Whatever, then. I thought we didn’t trust anyone.”
Was he for real? “Shawn, they’re going to do to us what they did to Kinder.”
“Which was?” His tone was cautious, like he didn’t really want to know or he already had an inkling.
“I don’t know what you know about our Circle’s history,” I started. “But before the Fire Circle was what it is today, they operated in Europe and the Middle East. The elemental-named Circles started there, and the names carried over to the United States.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
“Then you know that the succession of Leaders has stayed with our branch.”
“I figured.”
“Kinder was a Fire Circle Hunter in the ancient near east. She had magik and they found her, recruited her. She showed me how they saw her fighting with a demon, using her earth-elemental magik. They didn’t know, Shawn. Not at first. They thought she had the one power.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “And so did she, I assume?”
Nodding, I said, “Kinder showed me the first magik she stole after her Power had awoken. How she didn’t know what was happening. But then the Fire Circle, all of the Circles and Darkness, kept rounding up people with the Power and killing them. They were so scared, so terrified of someone with that much magik inside of them. Of the unnaturalness of it all. But Kinder managed to stay hidden until a mission went wrong.”
I glanced to the side, squinting, as if it’d help me remember the finer details of the vision. The more time that passed, the less I was able to recall. “Her team missed their mark and the only way to kill the demon was for Kinder to run on ahead, to claim the demon’s magik as her own and use it against him. So she did. And her team walked in on her doing it.”
“And they betrayed her,” Shawn said. “I know the story. They tried to imprison Kinder, but she escaped and found Aloysius, and he made her immortal. Then she slaughtered her whole team in revenge.”
Shaking my head, I looked back to Shawn. “That’s not all they did, Shawn. The Fire Circle did capture her, that part is true. But then they killed her entire family for hiding the fact she had the Power. Every last man, woman, and child blood-related to her. They imprisoned Kinder for her magik, a magik she didn’t even want or know how to control. They tortured her for months, only stopping to bribe her into using her Power for their devices—as a weapon, a tool instead of a naturally occurring thing.”
“They use us for our magik all the time,” Shawn said. “That’s what makes us Hunters. Besides, that was so long ago. The Fire Circle has evolved. Look at Riley—Jaffrin was protecting him.”
“No, you don’t understand. They used Kinder the same way Lady Azar wants to use Riley: as a vessel for power. Not as an extension of one’s ability to fight, but as a direct weapon against Darkness. A conduit. But to get her to that point after all they’d done… It was months of torture, Shawn. And when she escaped and found Aloysius, it was only to discover, a hundred years and three children later, that he’d wanted the same thing.”
Shawn stared at me, his mouth hanging open. He closed it as his brow furrowed. “That’s…”
“Exactly.”
“You got all of that out of one vision?”
I nodded. “It was mostly flashes, but enough to get the idea. And before you say it, I know that our magik, the Alzan magik, isn’t the same as the Power. It’s not a conduit; it can’t be used as a vessel.”
“But the Circles and the Powers need it to get to Alzan,” Shawn said. “So does Lady Azar and all of Darkness.”
“And if our magik really does balance out cianzas, or if it’s meant to once we unlock it—if all of this comes down to Cianza Alzan and what will happen if it explodes—then that’s what Kinder was warning us about. Shawn, we might be fighting on the side of Good, but the Circles and Darkness each have their own plans. I don’t intend to stick around and be pawns for either one of them.”
His mouth thinned as he watched me. He sighed. “You’re right.”
“I don’t want to be. The Fire Circle, despite Jaffrin, is supposed to be our home. It’s what we’re supposed to be fighting for, not running from.”
“But they’re terrified of your magik,” he said.
“And somewhat iffy about yours. Ember witches aren’t always trusted.” With good reason since their magik was demonic. Plenty of Ember witches had accidentally become demons because of that magik.
“I still want to make sure that Ben and the others won’t take the fall for us or our disappearance,” Shawn said. “I don’t care how important Alzan is. The city has waited this long; it can wait another couple days.”
“Assuming Lady Azar is going to wait long enough to use the magik on All Hallows’ Eve again to channel magik through Riley.”
His eyes narrowed. “You think she’ll wing it rather than wait eight months?”
“She’s got to be desperate. And with Giyano having turned on her…”
“We should tell Ben.”
“I think he knows. If not, I’ll leave it in our goodbye note. We need to leave the Fire Circle and search for these stones the Powers broke. If the prophecy is right, they’ll unlock our magik and we’ll get to Alzan. Start a war front there or something. Anything to keep that cianza from blowing.”
Shawn peered up at me. “I didn’t realize you cared that much about the city.”
“I care about living. And my freedom. And I don’t get either of those two things if Lady Azar wins.”
Shawn looked away, focusing on something on the other side of his room. Finally, he turned and pulled open a drawer in his nightstand and withdrew a beat-up, leather-bound journal with yellowing pages. “Then let’s do what we can to get ready. This is everything my family and I know about magik and the Powers. Maybe something in here will help. It’s been in my family line for generations.”
I grinned. “You’ve been holding out on me.”
He gave me a blank stare. “Just trying to make sure you weren’t evil after all.”
“Ha ha.” I held out my hand. “Let me look at that.”
Shawn and I gave up around midnight. This family line’s notes on magik and the world were extensive and oftentimes hard to read thanks to bad penmanship. But one thing became clear: the Ember line had never before encountered any “stones” made by the Powers… or anything made by them, period. Meaning that, as we thought, the Powers didn’t do much of anything but sit on their lofty asses and do even less about this war with Darkness than the Ether Head Circle did.