by Rene Sears
"At least you kept some promises." Gwen licked the smear of blood—Morgan's blood—on the edge of her golden blade.
Morgan made a horrible noise and listed sideways, clawing at her chest. She yanked the collar of her shirt down. The tiny acorns tattooed on the oak tree across her breastbone lit up, glowing a sickly, red, pulsing light.
"You can't hide them from me now. I've learned things—" Gwen's face contorted—with remembered pain? She touched her fingertips to her red mouth and brought them away smudged with Morgan's blood. Her fingers glowed the same red as the tattooed acorns. She gestured and Morgan winced, hands scrabbling at her chest. My stomach jolted. Not only the twins but Strangehold—and Hawthorn and Rose—were at risk.
"No." Morgan tried to summon a spell but it unraveled even as she cast it. Either the pain or the physical disruption of her spelled tattoo was keeping her from casting properly. Gwen smiled mirthlessly as she looked at us.
I shunted power to Morgan. "What are you trying to do? I'll help."
She gasped as the power took her by surprise, then wrested it into a sharp blade of energy. She sent it diving into her own chest and twisted. I winced for her, but she didn't flinch. The acorns popped free of the oak tree, ink lines shimmering on the air for a moment before dissolving into nothingness. Morgan half-stumbled against me, and I propped her up.
She had severed her link to the twins.
Gwen fell to her knees, still smiling that mad smile, and the hellhounds howled, a mournful, angry sound. The hair on my arms rose. I grabbed some of the currents of magic and twisted them into a knot of confusion. It wouldn't fool anyone for too long, but they'd have to waste some time looking—or smelling—for us before finding our trail. I braced my arm beneath Morgan and turned around.
And nearly swallowed my own tongue. The missing yath hound, the fluffy one, was waiting behind us. It could easily have killed us while we were fighting the others, but it hadn't. Its red eyes met mine, and its tail waved from side to side.
"Biscuit?" Morgan said, and the tail wagged faster. Biscuit? Seriously? "It's okay, Javier." Her voice was odd with pain. "I know him. He'll help us."
Lunn, a deep voice echoed in my head. Tell her my name is Lunn now. I stumbled and caught myself. I was almost, but not quite, getting used to creatures talking directly into my mind. The hellhound shoved his broad head under my hand and helped me balance before Morgan could stumble. His tail wagged.
"Lunn?" I said aloud.
"What?" Morgan didn't look good.
"I think the dog says his name is Lunn now."
The doorway was still silver and strong. A profound sense of relief washed through me, even as I heard footsteps—human and hellhound—coming closer, pushing through the knot I'd woven. I turned and saw Gwen was closer than I thought. She smiled when she saw my face, a nasty, smug smile. I panicked.
I flung a knot at the Blade, but I had worked too hastily. It hit her, but instead of disrupting her, it did no more than irritate her, and worse, the spell popped out of shape, unraveling and sending an irregular pulse of energy back at us.
The doorway flickered.
Lunn snapped and barked at the Blade and her hounds as I dragged Morgan to the gate. I might have messed it up. It wavered and looked wrong. But the only other option was staying here, and that wasn't going to happen.
Morgan gripped my shoulder and said. "Javier. Is it...Matthew?"
A thousand butterflies exploded in my stomach as she said my father's name again. But her eyes rolled back as she passed out against me before I could answer, not that I'd have known what to say. I heaved us both over the silver border of the doorway, and Lunn pushed in with us. Gwen howled in frustration, and the dogs echoed her, but it didn't matter. We were through and the gate snapped shut behind us. It didn't feel like the welcoming grasp of Strangehold or the challenging journey to Faerie; this transition lasted longer and was rougher. Energy pulsed around me and I couldn't feel Lunn's fur or Morgan's weight against me. Finally, the energy parted and released us. I stumbled forward onto a mossy expanse of ground.
Lunn bounded past me, turning around to face the gate, but the gate had snapped shut, and we were in a suddenly ringing silence after the baying of the hellhounds.
I pushed myself up to my knees. Something was wrong. We were surrounded by towering trees in sunlight. This wasn't Strangehold.
And Morgan was gone.
*
I stood, heart pounding. We could be anywhere. I had to narrow it down. We weren't in Faerie; spellsight showed me the familiar lines of the ley, spiderwebbing out around me, not the wash of omnipresent magic that had disconcerted me underhill. We were in a stretch of forest of dark pine and brighter green deciduous trees. Old leaves and pine straw dusted the trail between knotty roots and red-brown stones. A shelf fungus clung to the side of a fallen tree. The air smelled like dirt and growing things. I turned in a slow circle. Behind us was a stone arch, incongruously alone. It glowed silver: a feygate. Lunn snuffled around in the brush for all the world like a regular dog.
"Where are we? Where's Morgan?"
Lunn pulled his nose out of a bush and trotted over to me. We are overhill, not too far from my old home. Well, that was helpful. Morgan... His nostrils flared as he took in air. I don't know. The gate was in flux when we crossed it.
"That was my fault." Guilt caught at my throat. "The spell I cast must have messed with the gate."
Lunn fixed me with a red eye that was somehow both reassuring and slightly terrifying. You did well—you did not allow the queen to take us.
"We don't know where we are, and we don't know where Morgan is. She could be anywhere on earth."
Or in Faerie, Lunn said helpfully.
I groaned. Or maybe she made it to Strangehold; I could hope. Maybe she was with Rowan and the twins and everyone was okay. My stomach clenched; I guessed my gut didn't agree. I touched the cords at my wrist, not for a spell, but for reassurance. "I don't guess you can run to Faerie and check?"
Lunn barked a laugh. Young magician, I disobeyed an order of the queen and turned against her Blade. My former comrades will tear me to pieces if they see me. I am not yet ready to die.
"Why did you help us? I mean—thank you. We'd have both died without you. But..."
I owe Morgan a debt, he said simply. She saved my life and Rowan brought me to Faerie. You are their friend, and therefore you are mine.
"You weren't born there?" He looked different from the other hellhounds, but I hadn't thought what that might mean.
I was born mortal, like you. My mistress died of the magic sickness, and Rowan sent me to Faerie. My thoughts are changed and it is hard to remember, but it does not smell so different here from my former home. His nostrils flared again, and guilt stabbed me again. Even Lunn had lost someone as a result of my father's spell.
"All right, we can't just stay here." I pulled the glass disc from my pocket and held it up to the gate, but the light pointed faintly but persistently away from it. It didn't look like this gate would get us to Strangehold. "Looks like we need to head away from here if we want to find Morgan and the others again."
And I did. Even though I was still angry with the twins, much more than that, I wanted them to be okay. I felt a strange sympathy for them—now they too had a parent who was a monster. What did it say about me that I found that comforting?
Lunn circled, sniffing around, and eventually we found a trail we could follow. It wasn't too hot—and surely that was another good sign, that we hadn't gone far enough for the weather to change?—but I was thirsty before long. The adrenaline of the fight had drained away and left me empty and shaky. I'd kill for a sandwich. I swallowed, mouth dry, and kept walking.
Before we'd gone too far, I saw a sign: TRAILHEAD 4 MILES. Four miles wasn't that bad—shouldn't take us more than an hour and a bit, and then we could figure out where we were. I didn't bother looking at the disc just yet—I wasn't going to follow its direction through wilderness and lose the
trail. At least the scenery was pretty. The trees were taller here than the stunted pines that covered the island I'd called home.
Lunn stayed pretty close by, but occasionally left the trail to circle through the undergrowth. The first couple of times he did, I felt jumpy, but he never tensed up so I tried to ignore his coming and going. The trail sloped downward, and by the time the trees thinned and I saw the gray of asphalt beyond, the thought of walking to wherever the next gate was overwhelming. But we had to do it. I wished I had Morgan's truck.
The trailhead was just a parking lot off the road. There were a few cars parked here and there—hikers out for the day, I assumed. Lunn came up beside me, and I turned to him and nearly bit my tongue. Where the hulking red-eyed menace who'd accompanied me from Faerie had stood was a dog. A distinctly non-threatening dog, despite the fact that its head came nearly to my hip. It was fluffy, and had friendly brown eyes.
Glamour. Lunn wagged his tail. I couldn’t deny it would make it easier for us to move around, but I was a little surprised that I hadn't noticed him do it. But I hadn't been able to tell when the twins had used fae magic either.
A car door opened, and I looked around; I hadn't noticed that any of the cars in the lot were occupied. The guy that stepped out of the driver's seat was looking at me, and he seemed awfully familiar. Oh, shit.
It was the guy from the magic shop outside of Atlanta.
*
I touched Lunn's neck for support. I didn't like this at all. My pulse was speeding back up, kicking against my neck and wrists. Was this someone who knew my father, some enemy of his from the Association? How had he found me?
Lunn growled. Who is this man?
"I don't know," I muttered. "I saw him in Atlanta—he was following me—" But it had been a while since Atlanta—how had he known to come here?
"Hey, man, it's all right." The man said something else in Spanish. I had picked up a little here and there, and from my aunt, but my mother had flat out refused to teach it to me. I only ever heard her speak in it on the phone to her brothers and sister, or when she swore. But she never talked about the rest of her family. She said I was never going to meet them, and I didn't need to know it. I had regretted it before, and I regretted it more now.
"I don't speak Spanish," I said. His eyebrows shot up, and for a second he looked like he'd been slapped, but then his face relaxed, and he held his hands up, empty palms flat. I didn't trust it. If he was a caster, it didn't mean he was unarmed.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said.
"How did you find me?" I was struck again how familiar he looked—not from my seeing him in Atlanta. I'd never met him before, I knew that, but it was like I'd seen his face before. I just couldn't place it.
"You had a boss ward on you when you left Atlanta." He stopped several paces away, smiling. He was older than me, but probably not much. He had brown hair pulled back into a short ponytail, and dark eyes currently fixed on me, assessing. "But you dropped it a couple hours back. It was like you just popped into existence in the middle of the woods, so I came to get you."
"To get me?"
"To meet you, find you, whatever." He cocked his head to one side, a disarming gesture. "What's your name?"
"What's yours?"
"Teo." He licked his lips and looked fleetingly nervous. "Teo March Acosta. It's short for Matteo."
I narrowed my eyes to cover my shock. Those were my last names, too. And Matteo...Matthew...
What is it? Lunn asked inside my head.
He nodded. "It's your name, too, right? Two of them, anyway. What's your first name?"
"Javier."
His face momentarily softened. "I have a great-uncle Javier. She must have named you after him."
"Who are you?" He smiled, a quirk of the lips I recognized from the mirror. My stomach twisted like I was going to heave. Of course he looked familiar. He looked like me. He looked like my mother, and when I tilted my head, I could see my father's nose, the line of his brow. "How come I never...? I didn't know about you."
"I didn't know about you either," he said. He shrugged, but it wasn't casual.
I had a brother.
I had a brother my parents never told me about.
There was a hollow place in my chest. How could they have kept him from me?
"Where do you live? How come you didn't grow up on the island? Why didn't we know about each other?"
He popped a pack of gum out of his shirt packet, pulled out a stick, and offered me one. I shook my head. He leaned against a parked car and peeled back the foil. I leaned against the car opposite, but more because I wasn't sure my legs would hold me. Lunn circled the parking lot, smelling things. Teo tracked him for a second but then turned his attention back to the gum. "I live in Guaynabo." He glanced at me. "With our great uncle, Vicente Acosta Rivera. He raised me."
I shook my head. "Okay, but why? And why did our parents—" Boy, that our sounded weird. "—why did they never tell me about you?"
He hesitated, turning the gum over in his fingers. "I've only got guesses. Maybe you can fill in what I don't know. They met when Isabel was in New York for college. Gran Tío didn't approve, but I guess they were in love."
"What did he care?"
"Our family's kind of a big deal in the caster community. He was hoping she'd make a better match with someone from a more established, powerful family." He popped the gum into his mouth.
"What do you know about the Marches?"
He shrugged, and this time it was clear he didn't much care. "Not a lot. We can look into it if you want. Anyway, when Matthew got exiled, Isabel went to see him." It was odd hearing him call them by their first names, rather than Father and Mamá, but then, it would be odd if he did, too. "After she came back it was obvious pretty soon that she was pregnant. Tío was furious, but she stood her ground, so the family went to the little island to marry the two of them since Matthew couldn’t leave. Tío came to the hospital in Atlanta when she had me. When I was maybe a year and a half—old enough to wean, anyway—it became clear that I was going to have an ability for casting." He crumpled the gum wrapper in his fingers, then smoothed it out again. "Seems like you do too. I meant it about your ward—that was good work."
"Thanks," I said. "Both our parents taught me."
His fingers drummed against the car's hood. "Uncle Vicente came and got me, brought me home to the family. We have a lot of cousins. It seemed normal to be a part of the big pack of them—I don't remember anything different." His fingers stilled abruptly. He spat the gum into the wrapper, rolled it up, and stuck it in his pocket. "I regret not knowing Matthew and Isabel. I regret not knowing you."
For a second I couldn't say anything. My throat closed up. The enormity of his existence—and more, of his wanting to know me, regretting not knowing me—was a happiness painful in its intensity. He couldn't have known how much I wanted to belong to someone, but he glanced at me, and then away, and I could see I was not the only one wrestling with myself.
"How did you find out about me?" I managed, and my voice wasn't too much of a croak.
"When Isabel and Tío Esteban didn't answer calls or emails right around the time of the flu, I scryed for her, using my blood." So you could scry for blood if you were human. I made a distant note to tell Morgan there was a way if—no. When I saw her. Of course, now we knew where her sister was so maybe it didn't matter. "We found out she was dead, but we also found a secondary spark, somewhere out there. I didn't know what it was, but Gran Tío did. Oh, he was furious. No one ever knew about you. She kept you secret all that time."
"I used to go to the mainland when family came to visit," I said. "I never knew why." I resolved then and there to say nothing of my visits with my aunt. If Vicente had been furious with my mother, he would be just as angry with her, and she was still alive to bear the brunt of it. They ignored her a lot because she wasn't a caster. If Vicente would take one child away, who knew what he might do to the sibling who helped conceal another?
"They didn't want the family to know about me because they didn't want to lose another child, that's obvious, but why didn't they tell me about you?"
"My guess?" He smiled self-consciously. It was so weird—I'd seen that very expression on my own face, but I'd only just met him, and I had no idea what was going on behind his eyes. "Maybe they thought you'd want to find me if you knew about me. It must have been pretty weird growing up on that island all by yourself."
"Maybe. It was normal to me. It wasn't really until I started going to the mainland that I realized how isolated we were."
He twisted and pulled a little black book out of his pocket. When he flipped it open, there were sleeves for photos, and he flipped past a series of faces I didn't know, but that were all related to me somehow. My chest ached with a happiness that seemed a twin to sorrow. He stopped on a page in the middle, and my mother and father stared back at me, younger versions of themselves. "Do you know how they died?"
I wasn't ready to tell him that our father had been responsible for the worst disaster to befall the North American caster community since the peace. "I'm not sure," I said. That was true. "I was on the mainland when they...It was right around the Savannah flu." All of that was true. It just wasn't all of the truth.
"That's what our uncle thought." Teo pushed himself off the car. "I'm just sorry you've been on your own since then. But you don't have to be ever again. I'm going to take you home, and you'll see. We'll make up for all that time you spent alone." I bristled, a little. His home wasn't my home, and I hadn't been entirely alone; I'd had our parents. But I didn't say that. I didn't want to piss him off, when I'd only just found him.
"I can't," I said instead. "I don't have an ID. I don't even have a birth certificate. They never—"
"Javier, it's all right. We're casters, and we have money. We'll make it happen. Just wait until you meet everyone. There's a lot you'll need to learn, but it can wait 'til we get there—"
Lunn's bark interrupted the spiral of self-doubt and anxiety his words had sent me down. He trotted up, face set but without the flat ears and snarl I'd have expected if we were under attack. Morgan needs us.