by Vicki Keire
“He’s just being protective,” I said defensively. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure I wanted Ethan to relax. Mr. Markov moved a piece. His pieces remained white, and a tiny part of me felt relieved. How many more surprises lay in store for me about the people and town I thought I knew so well? “Am I right in assuming you’re like Mr. Markov, only… darker?” She moved another piece, not responding. “Ethan? Why couldn’t you tell?”
“I am best attuned to our kind,” he ground out through locked teeth.
“Really?” This was news. “So we could be surrounded by evil, and unless they were Nephilim…”
“You must,” Mr. Markov snapped, moving a bishop and snapping up one pawn and a rook from Mrs. Alice. “Stop thinking in those terms. Good and evil. Black and white. Absolutes.” He set the captured pieces down on his side of the board with an angry thunk. He tapped madly at his temple. “Spectrums, Caspia. Continuums. Shades of gray. Take Mrs. Alice here. She is no different from me. We are both practitioners of the same Art. We are both community leaders of the same Art. However, I lead those who follow a…lighter spectrum. My colleague’s path is… somewhat darker. Not evil. Merely different. We meet sometimes as all good leaders do: to sort out differences, to air grievances, to share information. I would not consort with evil.”
“And neither would I,” added Mrs. Alice, somewhat haughtily, as she demolished a line of white glass pieces.
“But what does that even mean?” I wailed. “Light and Dark. Good and evil. They’re just words. They mean the same thing.”
“No.” Mr. Markov’s fist came down on the table, shaking the board and all its pieces. “They are actions, Caspia, as well as words. But the actions behind them matter most. Neither Mrs. Alice nor myself would sit here in the very heart of our home and play chess with evil.”
“This town is a refuge for all types of supernaturals, of the Light and the Dark, and yes, we do not always get along.” She flashed Mr. Markov a smile. “Sometimes, there is outright war amongst us. But what I think you mean as evil? Sacrificing innocents and mortals, for one? Murder? No. What you must learn, Caspia dear,” she moved a pawn. “Is that Dark does not mean evil, and Light does not always equal good.”
I remembered Ethan’s warning from the bakery: Evil, real evil, should it ever show itself to you, will wear the most beautiful form you’ve ever seen and charm you as nothing ever has.
His angry voice pulled me back. “Then how do you explain the demon taint surrounding your store the night I first came to you? The night I met Caspia? Even the Dark Realms will not give it sanctuary.” Ethan had risen from his crouch and pulled me with him. He still stood in front of me, but he stood to the side of the chess game now.
Mrs. Alice paused mid-move. She replaced her piece on its original square. “Forgive me, Omar. The rules allow, if I don’t remove my hand…” He waved her words away as inconsequential. She rubbed the bridge of her nose with her left hand. Light refracted off the rings she wore. Mrs. Alice stared off into nothing for a moment, her eyes going slightly unfocused. “Such a creature is loose in Whitfield?” she asked slowly.
“Such a creature was in your shop,” Ethan told her tersely. “Such a creature bought all her tarot cards and tried to lure her to it by using you as its agent. You are the one who gave her the phone number of a stranger who wanted a ‘private commission,’ aren’t you?”
Mrs. Alice had gone as white as Mr. Markov’s chess pieces. She looked ill. Mr. Markov reached for her. “Alice,” he said reassuringly. “There was already an attack. A mad Nephilim, lost for many centuries now. We thought it was over, but he must not have been the one. We’ll check your wards. We’ll get both our circles together, if we must, to reinforce them. Caspia’s Guardian said himself he is best attuned to his own kind. It is the same for all of us; we often see only our own kind. It isn’t another magic user. That has to be the reason why.”
She shook her head violently. “That’s no excuse. Why didn’t I recognize it? Why didn’t I know? To endanger an innocent that way… If her Guardian hadn’t come along then… who knows what could have happened?”
A bitter uneasiness had begun to skitter down my neck. “She’s not an innocent,” Ethan said. I blushed scarlet and was about to protest, but Ethan overrode me. “She’s known she has Nephilim blood for a while now, and she’s had Nephilim-born abilities her whole life.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling silly and shy at the same time. I was relieved to know my ‘innocence’ meant nothing more than whether I had a touch of the supernatural or not. I’d genuinely thought the attacking angels in the park had been out just to insult me. “But Ethan’s not my Guardian,” I said to Mrs. Alice and Mr. Markov. “Ethan’s here for Logan.” I wanted to be clear about that.
“Then why…” Mr. Markov began. He thought for a minute, and I actually watched his formerly open face close down into inscrutability. I saw the realization hit him: the man beside me was guardian of my brother’s death. “Oh. You’re that kind of Guardian.” He turned his sightless eyes on Ethan with a new kind of wariness. “Then why, pray tell, aren’t you with your actual charge?”
“Because both of them asked me not to be,” he said softly, so softly, the wind stole his words easily away. His neck and shoulders bowed suddenly, as if carrying a weight none of us could see. “And because I have nothing else to give him.”
“Logan’s on a date,” I said, defensively. “With Amberlyn. They’re meeting us here. In just a few minutes, actually.”
“The demon seems to be targeting Caspia exclusively,” Ethan seconded. He looked at me guiltily. “It seemed a shame to interrupt them.” He didn’t add, when Logan has so little time, but he might as well have. The sentiment hung thickly in the air around us.
Mrs. Alice shook her head and wrapped her cashmere shawl more tightly around her shoulders. With shaking hands, she began to gather her pieces together. They turned from black to white as she gathered them together. “If you’ll forgive me, Omar. My mind will no longer allow me to concentrate on beating you this evening. It seems there is much to tell my circle.”
Mr. Markov gathered the pieces and began methodically storing them in their folding box that doubled as a storage box. “As do I,” he murmured. “You will allow me to walk you home?” Mrs. Alice nodded and rose in one graceful gesture.
I found myself enveloped in an embrace of lavender and cashmere before I realized her intentions. “Don’t let this change how you feel about me, or Whitfield,” she whispered, her fingers in my hair trembling slightly with age for the first time in my memory. “I’m the same woman I’ve always been. And everyone in this town will fight for you. You’re one of us, Caspia dear.” Lips coated lightly with beeswax and honey, her own preparation and a marvel against the chapped harshness of winter, pressed gently against my cheek. “Your mother didn’t know what we were. Your gifts passed her by, somehow. But she was dear to me anyway. I think she would be proud, if she could see you now. You’re such a strong young woman.” Mrs. Alice smiled at me, and, Dark Witch or not, something lightened inside me. Some burden I’d been carrying slipped off of its own accord. I remembered hot chocolates in her store while my mother bought loose tea and spices. I remembered piling pretty stones into little houses and smiling at Logan who wanted badly to throw one at me but couldn’t because both my mother and Mrs. Alice would catch him.
Mrs. Alice, who brewed special teas when we had colds as children; who bandaged my arm when I’d burned it the night I’d met Ethan; who insisted on drinking my coffee out of fine china; she couldn’t be evil. My mother loved and trusted her. So had Gran. She was proof positive that Dark and Evil weren’t the same thing.
I had just turned to Ethan, at peace with my decision, when the screaming started far across the square.
I felt it like a punch in the stomach, and I knew.
Chapter Fifteen:
Truths Laid Bare
I had one horrified second to look Ethan full in the eyes, to see the horrible c
ertainty stamped there, before grabbing him by the front of my brother’s borrowed sweater. My hands trailed shadows as I fisted them. “Take me,” I demanded. I did not shout. My voice surprised me with its low, deadly hiss. “Use your wings if you must. I don’t care who sees. But do it. Now.”
I was a feral thing, snarling against him, against the rising screams and breaking glass across the square. I had just enough time to see his eyes flare an intense silver as my own terror spiked and reflected back at me, drowning out the pale blue green tint of his own eyes completely, before light flared at his back and we were gone.
A brief moment of disorientation, of nausea that should have brought me to my knees but didn’t. Grief did that, all by itself.
Funny how we’d spent all our time worrying about Dark Nephilim and the insidious spread of cancer, yet in the end, something as routine as a traffic accident struck the final blow. Later I would read the report. Later I would close my eyes and see the scene of the accident: the way one car had swerved to avoid another, and lost control of the vehicle. I would read about how the driver of the second vehicle had driven into a lamppost, putting himself in the hospital, in an effort to avoid hitting pedestrians. I would hear the word “hero” applied to my brother with only the barest hint of a snarl, because Logan had pushed Amberlyn out of the way. If he hadn’t, she’d have been pinned between the oncoming car and a wrought-iron lamppost reinforced with concrete and steel posts. She’d have been crushed. She’d be dead.
Instead, my brother got her out of the way.
How had he managed it? Long-buried Nephilim blood must have come up boiling, because no cancer patient should have been able to move so fast or shove a healthy young woman, even a small one like Amberlyn, eight feet clear of the wreck. Yet he did. Amberlyn recalled only motion and sound and the final jarring impact of pavement well clear of the wreck.
I wondered if I would ever stop hating her.
Lying in a pool of his own blood, flat on his back across the hood of a car, eyes glassy and staring up at the sky, my brother Logan stretched immobile and white. Shattered glass glittered across his body like cheap carnival jewelry. The shoulder and arm nearest what remained of the windshield were oddly angled. One leg lay twisted back and under. But the rest of him seemed grotesquely peaceful, as if he had just chosen a particularly dangerous and uncomfortable place to watch the sky. He didn’t blink. His chest neither rose nor fell.
Nothing in the whole world existed but my brother: not sound, not the driver of the car, not the flashing ambulance lights, not Amberlyn, not even Ethan. I’m sure someone must have tried to stop me, but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember anyone touching me or restraining me at all. Maybe they didn’t. Perhaps Ethan brought me right up to the wreckage and kept them all away. Maybe they saw something in my face, in both our faces, Ethan’s and mine, worse than death. Later, I would wonder how I managed to get past law enforcement and EMTs to perch directly on the car hood next to my brother’s inert form, but right then, I was safe inside my bubble with Logan.
“Hey, Logan,” I said softly. I found myself looking directly down at him. I brushed glass off his forehead. He’d lost his ball cap. He wouldn’t like that, all these people seeing his bald head. His glassy eyes held no recognition. “It’s ok,” I said, sliding up next to him. “You’re going to be cold,” I told him, placing one flat palm, light as a single sheet of paper in a strong wind, over his heart. “We can’t have that.” Tears had started. I made no move to stop them. Something subhuman had taken over; the wrecked body underneath my palm was the only thing linking me to the person who had been Caspia. “You can’t leave yet,” I insisted. “Not like this.”
Someone else was inside the bubble with me. Or something. A being made almost entirely of Light. I looked, disbelieving, as Ethan held out his hand to me. “Let me take him,” he said, softly, as if talking to a child. The tears were coming harder now, so I had to squint to see him clearly. “Cas. Please. Let me take him.” Ethan stretched to grasp Logan’s hand, the one attached to his grotesquely twisted shoulder.
Take him? Take him where?
I tried to speak. I discovered a new thing, then; tears do not just happen in the eyes. They collect in the throat, where they can choke and drown. “Resting,” I finally managed, almost dying on the word. “He’s just resting.” I did not move my flattened palm. It hovered just above my brother’s unmoving chest. Glass ground into the backs of my thighs, slicing through the silver of my skirt. I did not, dared not move.
“Caspia,” Ethan said again. Light pulsed at his back, strong and steady as ever. “Let me take him. He’s…” Ethan tore his eyes from me to look, long and hard, at my brother’s wrecked body. “He’s in agony, Cas. Let me give him rest.”
Rest?
“No.” I rubbed my face against my free forearm. “He’s not dead yet. It’s not supposed to happen like this.” I looked at Ethan. “You know that. It’s not right.” This last, in a whisper.
“I don’t know that,” he countered, releasing Ethan entirely. He moved closer to me, crawling up the hood of the car until he faced us both on his knees. “I only know it’s my job to see him safely home. To the Realms, Caspia. Where he won’t feel any pain. Where your family waits for him. Where it’s beautiful. You know it is. It’s another reason I took you there, if only to the edges. It's not allowed, but I wanted you to see. Don’t you want that for him?”
His voice was soft and warm and all enveloping. He was so careful with me, my Ethan, over my brother’s broken body. He was afraid for me, I could tell. This moment could break me, shatter me forever.
He was afraid for us. This moment could break us.
Would break us.
I felt it happening. Half my heart was dying between us, and what could I give him, give anyone, then?
I looked down at my brother again. His blood soaked my silver skirt. “Your… job,” I echoed. “And then what? You’ll turn your back on the Realms and move in and play house?” I felt my eyes blaze to match my skirt, my hands smeared with blood. “Is that what you want, Ethan? To get this over with so you can hurry up and join the ranks of the Fallen?” I said the word “this” with a brutal emphasis that made me draw my knees up to my chest. “A job, your job, that’s what he was, the whole time, and you didn’t even pay attention to him.”
“That’s not true.” Light enfolded us both. “I’m so, so sorry. Maybe you’re right that it wasn’t meant to happen this way. Maybe it's not some random accident, and if it's not, I swear to you, we'll find who did this. But he’s in agony, Caspia, and I will see him safe.” He softened his tone as he steeled himself to gather us both in his arms. “You would want that, too, if you weren’t in shock.”
Rage, the feral subhuman kind that seared all reason, ran through me in one angry throb. “Get your hands off me,” I snarled in a voice even I didn’t recognize. “Off both of us.” I scrambled backwards, laying both hands on my brother’s heart. “The Light. You draw power, sometimes. When you…” I trailed off, frustrated. The right words wouldn’t come. Fine. I’d show him. Palms out, I tried to focus. “Let me try.”
He stood with his head bowed, as if I also held his heart in my hands. “You’re going to try to draw power from the Realms. For Logan.” It was not a question, so I didn’t answer. “I should never have taken you. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll change everything.”
Why did he sound like I was tearing out his heart, instead of giving my brother’s back to him?
Sobbing, I pressed down on Logan’s chest like I was trying CPR. “I don’t know what to do,” I admitted. “You only just started to teach me. We had so little time.” For the first time ever, Ethan looked like the fragile one. I needed him to be strong. I needed him. “Please,” I whispered, and this time, it was a prayer, of a sort.
“I’ll do it,” he whispered. “Light save me, I’ll do it.” Rough warm fingers wrapped around my neck. “It’s a gift of your blood, Caspia,” Ethan said. G
ran’s words. “The Light, your drawings… even the Dark. They all come from the same place. But it will take Light to bring your brother back.” All I felt was emptiness and cold, bitter fear, until Ethan said, so faint I think I wished it, “Take mine.”
Light pulsed against Logan’s chest, the same kind I had used to knock Ethan down when he took me to the Realms of Light. I felt it burn through me, taking all my rage with it, out through my hands and into my brother’s body where some answering echo in the blood recognized the light and welcomed it.
I fell back against the hood of the car, my palms blistered.
Logan began to breathe.
EMTs swarmed us, crowding around my brother, creating a screen between us with their unfamiliar actions and equipment. Ethan had me around the waist, pulling me backwards and out of their way. Only when I was off the car hood did I start to fight him in earnest.
If I had any doubt Ethan was abnormally good, they evaporated right then. He let me hit him. He let me yell at him and claw at his sweater. He let me sob and shriek. In short, I went hysterical on him, and he merely stood there and took it until I ran out of anger and hysterical fear. Even then, he was there to catch me. Eventually, I calmed down enough to realize that Amberlyn was standing beside me, standing statue-like and glassy-eyed, except for a violent trembling that came in occasional spasms.
“It was going to hit me,” she finally managed to explain, after many stops and starts. “He pushed me out of the way.” Then she burst into hysterical sobbing that didn’t stop until I pushed her over to an EMT who seemed more than happy to take charge of her. I didn’t want to look at her anymore. Maybe later I would regret it, but for now, I cared about no one except Logan.
No one.
“Would you really have taken him from me?” I asked Ethan wearily at last.