by SM Reine
“Always.” James’s voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat before trying to speak again. “Just…go to Oymyakon. There’s a field where the farmers walk their cattle in the summers. She’ll come back there. It might take a few weeks. There’s a house you can stay in, if you—”
“Logistics are no problem, Jimmy. You know I’d pick go pick her up even if you hadn’t saved my arse—can’t leave a pretty girl lost in Russia. But I still think it should be you.”
“You’ll do it, though?” James pressed.
“I’ll do it.”
That tension in his skull alleviated. Just a little. “Thank you,” James said.
“You two are so fucked up.” He stood, taking his snifter of gin with him, and leaned into the living room. “Oi! Ladies! Nice to meet you! I’m out of here.”
If there was a response, James didn’t hear it.
Malcolm turned back, and the two men shook hands. The kopis had a firm grip and an unusually serious look in his eye.
“What do I tell her when she shows up?” Malcolm asked. “Should I have her meet you somewhere?”
James’s head throbbed again. “Just tell her…tell her I’m sorry.”
“Ah,” Malcolm said. “Gotcha.”
He gave a short nod, then headed out the back door into the black night.
X
The scrying spell required more space than James’s parents’ house had indoors, even in his old study, so he took his supplies outside. The air was moist with the promise of spring rain. A chill breeze bit at his nose and chin.
James picked a spot on the lawn where the house would shelter him from the wind and began to prepare the circle.
The moon was high in the sky by the time he finished digging the first quadrant into the soil. More than once he caught himself drawing a line incorrectly, or putting the right rune in the wrong place.
He sat back on his heels, trying to make sense of the lines, but it wouldn’t come together. The fatigue was too strong.
Nathaniel appeared, standing outside the circle. He only needed to glance at it to say, “That’s wrong.” He pointed at the north corner.
He was right. James started over on that quadrant. “Would you like to help me?”
Nathaniel scuffed his shoe in the mud. “That’s why Mom sent me down. To help you.”
“Very well. Help yourself.”
Nathaniel grabbed a spade from the nearby tool shed and went to work. James didn’t have to tell him which parts of the circle were missing. He joined in with as much confidence as if the circle belonged to him, and James was only helping.
As Nathaniel worked, James searched his face for a hint of familiarity. A sign that this was his son, and not a young man that simply resembled him. Nathaniel met his gaze with defiant anger.
That anger—James understood that kind of anger well.
Maybe they were related after all.
“There,” Nathaniel said, wiping his hands off on his jeans. He left muddy handprints on his thighs.
“Let’s take a look at the entrance to the Haven,” James said, drawing the final lines.
He bent to grab one of the notebook pages off of the ground, but Nathaniel grabbed it first. He held it out of reach. “I’m not going,” Nathaniel said. “You know that, right? I can’t go somewhere that I’ll be a cripple.”
James held out his hand. “Give that to me.”
“No. Listen. I’m good at this stuff—I know I’m good at this, everyone in the coven says so. And I’ve been working on my interdimensional stuff. I think I’m about to come up with something amazing. Something better than anything that you’ve ever…”
Nathaniel didn’t have to finish the sentence for James to know what he had been about to say.
He stepped forward and took the paper out of Nathaniel’s hand. “Do you think this is a competition between us?”
The boy’s eyes glowed with barely-restrained anger. “I know it is.”
“There’s no need for us to be at odds.” James flicked the paper at the circle. It ignited. “In any case, you have about thirty years to catch up with me.”
The map snapped out flat in the circle, as if pulled between two dogs playing tug-of-war. A hazy blue ghost of the topography appeared above it. The trees were barely more than wisps of smoke, as if the hills themselves were on fire.
It was a new use of akashic magic, this model, and James expected that Nathaniel would have never seen it before. But the boy looked as unimpressed as ever.
“The highway,” Nathaniel said, pointing between two hills.
James traced the road into the hills and found a service road branching off the highway.
He gestured to enlarge the topographical image until he could see a tiny line that looked like a fence. It surrounded a cave set into a hill. An outbuilding was parked in front of it, as well as three tiny SUVs, each no larger than a toenail.
“Is this real?” Nathaniel asked, tilting his head as he studied the map.
“Yes. It’s somewhat like scrying. What you see here is a representation of reality.”
James made note of the outpost’s location on the map. The three SUVs probably carried two men each. Six guards, nine at the most. More than Malcolm’s estimate.
He watched his son’s face through the hazy blue forest. It distorted his features and almost made his eyes glow with blue light.
“There’s a cost to power, Nathaniel. I designed this spell—and thousands of others—but it was not free,” James said. “The foundation of knowledge upon which I craft my magic came at a high price.”
“Don’t lecture me.”
They both stood. Nathaniel was almost up to James’s chest now. It wouldn’t be long before he outgrew his father.
“People you love will die if you stay here,” James said.
Nathaniel lifted his chin in defiance. “I’m not afraid. I’ll protect myself. I’ll protect everyone.”
“There are worse things that can happen to you than dying.”
“That doesn’t mean I should run and hide in some other dimension. I’m not a coward like you are!” Nathaniel snapped.
James felt like a deflated balloon. Coward. That word stung.
Waving his hand, he dismissed the spell.
When James spoke again, his voice was softer than before. “Why are you angry at me, Nathaniel? I didn’t choose to be absent from your life.”
“I know.” Nathaniel seemed to chew over his next words, mouth twisting and brow furrowed. “I saw you kissing her.” His gaze fixed on a spot over James’s shoulder. “I saw you kissing Elise.”
James knew before he turned that he would see Hannah watching. “I told you to see if he needed help,” she said, approaching the circle with another mug of tea in her hands. “That doesn’t mean that you should bother him. Go inside and sleep.”
“But Mom—”
“Go,” she said.
“I hate both of you,” Nathaniel muttered.
He trudged through his grandmother’s bushes. The branches closed around him, but James could hear him crashing around for several more seconds before the front door opened and slammed closed again. The entire building shook.
James braced himself for Hannah’s vitriol. Even though they hadn’t been together in a long time, he felt, maybe irrationally, that he owed her some kind of explanation for his relationship with Elise—as if he could possibly put together a decade’s worth of feelings into a sentence.
“Hannah—” he began, but she cut him off.
“It’s fine. Nathaniel’s just at that age where he hates everything. And it’s not easy to find out that your heroes are human.”
James hadn’t been trying to start a conversation about Nathaniel. The change in subject threw him.
“Wait, hero?”
“The coven deifies you. I tried to shelter Nathaniel from it, but he studied with Landon, and…well, he heard things.” Hannah sipped her tea. The steam spiraled toward the stars. “He’s spent his
entire life looking up to you. Be patient. Talk with him, not at him.”
Attempting to have another heart-to-heart with Nathaniel sounded about as pleasant as surrendering himself to Union custody again.
“If he refuses to go into the Haven…”
“I can talk him into it,” Hannah said. “Did the spell work?”
“Yes, but we need a car to get there. My parents must have left their truck at the airport.” He gestured toward the trees. “I’ll have to hike down to Thistle’s and ‘borrow’ her van.”
“I’ll get Nathaniel and Ariane ready,” she said. “Should we—”
A tree at the bottom of the hill rustled, and James cut Hannah off with a gesture.
James squinted into the darkness and saw nothing. But a sense of power rippled over him, making the skin on his shoulders rise in goosebumps.
His eyes skimmed the trees, searching for the source of that sensation. It tickled his crown as though his chakra had been jolted with electricity. The forest seemed to loom over them, darker and deeper than it had been a few minutes before.
They weren’t alone.
“What’s wrong?” Hannah asked.
“Just get the others,” James said. “We’re leaving.”
He stepped forward to search for the origin of those sensations as Hannah ducked into the house. A breeze rustled the branches around them. Clouds slid in front of the moon, then revealed it again in tantalizing peeks of pale gold.
“Who’s there?” he called.
He hadn’t expected anyone to reply, so he wasn’t surprised when only silence responded. There was no sign that the forest was anything but peaceful. A barn owl hooted.
Yet the energy at his crown was building, and with it came a sense of dread.
There must have been an angel nearby.
The door opened again. Ariane’s hair was frizzed and her skirt was twisted halfway around her hips, as though Hannah had dragged her out of bed. Nathaniel skulked behind them.
“Hurry,” James said, taking Ariane’s arm and leading her down the trail.
“Where are we going?” she asked. Her accent was thicker when she was sleepy.
“We’re visiting another coven member to borrow her van.”
“I thought you were going to get that on your own,” Hannah said. The unspoken question was obvious: What changed?
But James didn’t respond. He walked Ariane as quickly as he could down the hill, seeking out the trail that he had taken a thousand times as a boy. Thistle had a nephew his age named Grant, and they used to use that trail to meet up with one another at night.
Nathaniel pulled a spell out of his Book of Shadows. “Wait until we’re deeper in the forest,” James said.
“But—”
“Wait,” Hannah snapped.
Nathaniel huffed and shoved past them.
The feeling of power faded with every step they took away from James’s parents’ house. He glanced over his shoulder as they stepped carefully over the dark, rocky trail.
He wasn’t sure if it was just a trick of the light or not, but he thought he saw something flying over the roof of the house. Something too large to be a bird.
Then the trail turned, and he lost sight of the house.
It took almost an hour to hike to Thistle’s house. Ariane walked slowly, as if her legs were tied together at the knees, and James was half-tempted to throw her over his shoulder to get there faster.
He wasn’t the only impatient one. Despite Hannah’s warnings, Nathaniel kept disappearing from sight, running ahead on the trail only to return minutes later. Every second that he was gone felt like hours. James kept expecting to turn a corner and find Nathaniel dead.
But eventually the forest thinned, and James recognized Thistle’s backyard. She had replaced the siding on her house and moved the garden since his last visit.
“Wait here,” James said, and he left Ariane to sit on a tree stump while he jogged to the shed.
Of all the things that had changed, Thistle’s van was not among them. It was a giant brown box on wheels, a relic of the sixties, and a mobile made of colorful glass still dangled in one of the windows.
The driver’s side door was unlocked. James climbed ran his hands over the steering wheel cover, which was made of the same shag material as the carpet in back. The upholstery still smelled like sticky-sweet smoke. A pair of fuzzy dice dangled from the rearview mirror, and he ripped them down.
Thistle’s keys weren’t in the glove box like they used to be, but he didn’t let that deter him. He had watched Elise hotwire a car once. Though he wasn’t sure where she had picked up that particular skill, he was grateful for it now.
James pulled out the wires behind the steering column and sparked the engine to life.
The van grumbled like a dragon, and the radio crackled. He punched the button to silence it.
He jumped out of the van and waved to the others.
Ariane, Nathaniel, and Hannah filed through the yard. James opened the back for them, and Nathaniel balked at the door, nose wrinkling.
“Oh, this van,” Ariane whispered to Hannah with a girlish giggle. “Christine and I borrowed this van once, and we…” At Hannah’s look, she stopped talking.
There were two benches in the back, one against each side. Ariane and Nathaniel took position across from each other. Hannah slammed the door and joined James in the front seat.
He disengaged the emergency break and let the van roll out of the shed, steering it over the curb and onto the street. James didn’t breathe until they had turned the corner, leaving Thistle’s house far behind them.
He handed the map to Hannah. “I’ll need you to give me directions.”
She frowned at the paper, turning it over in her hands. “I see the entrance to the Haven, but where are we on this?”
“Give it to me,” Nathaniel said with a long-suffering sigh.
He took the map from her, messed with his cell phone, and then handed that to Hannah. The route to the turnoff was highlighted in blue on his GPS.
“You don’t always need magic if you’re not stupid,” he said.
James opened his mouth to snap at him, but Hannah’s cold stare caught his eye. So all he said was, “Thank you for helping.”
By the time that James got on the freeway heading northwest, he was starting to feel giddy—Nathaniel’s snark aside.
In the past few days, he had been arrested, escaped from detention, and jumped from a crashing airplane. Now there was nothing between them and safety but a couple hundred miles of road and a handful of Union guards. It could only get easier from here.
A shadow flashed across the moon, killing James’s sense of relief. The silhouette looked like an eagle, but eagles didn’t fly at night, and he had never seen a bird of prey that size.
James hadn’t escaped the angel just yet.
They were being hunted.
They stopped twice on the way to the Haven—long enough to fill the van with gas, and for Ariane to empty her bladder. Then Hannah took a turn behind the wheel and drove like a woman possessed.
It was almost dawn when Nathaniel’s GPS chimed, announcing that they had reached the service road. The sky was still black, but the morning birds were beginning to chirp in the trees as the owls fell silent.
The instant that they stopped the car, Nathaniel jumped out of the van.
James moved to follow. Hannah stopped him.
“I’ll take care of it,” she said.
Hannah followed her son out of the van. She only managed to catch up with him when he had almost disappeared among the trees, well outside of earshot.
That left James sitting in the van with Ariane. He had avoided her all night, but there was no avoiding her now.
He felt like he should speak to her, reminisce about the past, or maybe make apologies—none of which sounded pleasant. Instead, he kept his gaze forward and pretended to watch for danger.
But Ariane didn’t seem to share James’s antisocial
urges. “Sit with me,” she said, patting the bench beside her.
He didn’t move. “I should keep an eye out.”
A tiny, teasing smile spread over her lips. “Wouldn’t you like to learn some magic?”
“I’m extremely doubtful that you know anything I don’t.”
“Then I’m extremely thrilled to surprise you. Join me. Please.”
He climbed into the back of the van. It was strange for James to kneel at Ariane’s feet, the same way that he had when he was just a boy and she was a young woman. But her time in Hell had suspended Ariane in her twenties; now he was the one going gray, and she was hardly any older than Elise.
She gave a bright laugh at the sight of him on his knees. “Sit here,” Ariane said, patting the bench beside her again.
Hesitantly, James took a seat.
She turned to lean against him. Her soft hair brushed against his cheek, the aroma of her perfume wafting around him.
Her body molded against his, and James’s spine stiffened. “Ariane…”
She took his hand and placed his palm flat against her stomach. “Quiet,” she said, fingers tightening on his when he tried to pull away.
And then—a kick.
“Shh,” Ariane told her stomach. “Do you feel the way that the muscle tenses, James?”
He was doing his best not to feel anything at all. She smelled and felt too much like Elise. It was a cruel reminder of what he had done, the oaths he had kept, the promises he had broken.
But he did feel her stomach muscles tensing in a contraction.
“Birthing magic is among the most ancient.” Ariane’s voice was low and soothing. “The gods damned us with agony in labor, and so our human midwives found ways around that curse. You are no midwife, but you can ease my pain.”
“Are you in pain?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “It won’t be long before I give birth.”
Ariane plucked a small vial of potion out of the neck of her dress. She massaged the oil over the back of James’s hand. It warmed with the radiant heat of magic, tingling and pulsing in time with the flow of his blood.
“This ritual was written in one of Pamela’s books. You should look it up so that you can use it whenever you choose,” Ariane said.